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Acknowledgments:
I thank the imam who let me stay at his mosque in northwestern China during my research for this article. He must remain unnamed. I thank audiences at the University of Toronto, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Hong Kong for their responses to this project. Particular thanks go to Daniel Buck, Joseph Askew, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Hilde De Weerdt, and Timothy Brook at Oxford, and Helen Siu and Wu Yi at Hong Kong. I am grateful to my wife, Monica Prasad, for insisting on preserving my description of Zhang's mythical experience in the snowfall when I wanted to delete it. I thank Vivienne Shue and the Contemporary China Studies Programme at Oxford for a three-year postdoctoral fellowship free of teaching, and for funding a summer of research in China. Without Vivienne Shue and her program, I could not have written this article. I thank my two advisors for their respective forms of encouragement: hyperbolic praise from Brinkley Messick and relentless optimism from Erik Mueggler. I am most grateful to four anonymous CSSH reviewers who opened up for me perspectives on Zhang's History of the Soul to which I had been blind. All translations from the Chinese and German are mine unless otherwise indicated.
In December of 1984, Zhang Chengzhi, a thirty-six-year-old ethnologist from Beijing and an important novelist in contemporary Chinese literature, reached a small village on the loess plateaus of northwestern China. An impoverished farmer, Ma Zhiwen, hosted Zhang during his brief stay and introduced him to the local community of Muslims who practiced Sufism, a form of mystical Islam. Night after night, the Muslim villagers sought Zhang out to tell him about events in the history of their Sufi order, the Zheherenye.2 Zhang learned that Zheherenye Sufis carefully cultivated historical memories reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century when the order was founded by a Chinese Sufi returned from Yemen. Since then, the order had been led by a murshid, the Arabic word for mentor or spiritual guide. During the last dynasty of the Chinese empire, which fell in 1911, the Zheherenye were often outlawed and clashed repeatedly with the imperial army in regional wars that the Sufis always lost. Interpreting their defeats...