China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society) by Matthew S. Erie

Author:Matthew S. Erie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Patriarchies in the Northwest

As clerics mediate the legal orders through dispute resolution in the Northwest, the gender of clerics is a helpful starting point in evaluating the magnitude of patriarchy in the region. Men monopolize almost all positions of authority at mosques and Sufi tomb complexes in the Northwest. There are no female clerics in Linxia, for example. A well-respected Yihewani cleric told me, “You cannot use the word cleric [ahong] to describe a woman.”

However, there are some female clerics in the neighboring autonomous region of Ningxia. In Haiyuan County, for instance, the Qingzhen Grand Mosque includes a women’s mosque, which also has a madrasa attached. The women’s madrasa has approximately two hundred students and five teachers called, contrary to the Linxia cleric’s admonition, “female clerics” (nü ahong). These clerics, who live at the madrasa, mediate disputes among women and men in the community; the majority of the cases they handle involve conflicts between mothers- and daughters-in-law, marital discord, and traffic accidents.

Additionally, female clerics are well documented in central China (e.g., Zhongyuan) (Shui and Jaschok 2002). The tradition of female clerics in central China dates back to the late Ming period and is thus a Gedimu innovation, long predating the arrival of the reformist strains of the Yihewani and Salafiyya. The female clerics trace their role not to a specific basis in the revealed law but rather to the role of female religious scholars who came from prominent families of scriptural teachers (Jaschok and Shui 2000: 83). In recent years, the state media have spotlighted female clerics in official accounts of Islam. In the mediatized production of official Islam, female clerics represent China’s unique contribution to global Islam: a privileged status for women. It is not just Islamic law, but also gender under Islam that obtains a spectacular quality through such official reproduction.

The Northwest is not central China, however. Of the thirty-four mosques in Linxia, only five have a prayer hall for women, while others may draw a curtain for women around a portion of the prayer hall. There are no women’s mosques in Linxia. There is one women’s mosque in Lanzhou, which was founded in 1938 by women from Henan, and several more in Ningxia, as mentioned. Of the twenty-three Sufi tomb complexes I visited in Linxia, there is one exception to the rule that Sufi patrilineages are male: Madam Tomb Complex (Taitai Gongbei) is devoted to a female Sufi shaykh. Guo Tomb Complex had two female initiates from Ningxia in 2011. During saints’ days, women rarely read liturgical texts and do not receive nietie (alms) for such demonstrations of piety. Women and children wait for husbands and fathers to communally eat the meal that concludes the observance. The role of uneducated women is defined as bearing children and maintaining the home. The emphasis on women’s wifely role—that is, as a certain relationship to her husband—is consonant with Qurʾanic dictates (Spectorsky 2010) and also with traditional Confucian expectations (Barlow 2004: 37–65). Male dominance in positions of leadership is not limited to religion, however.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.