{"id":394,"date":"2014-03-03T10:54:01","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T10:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.soundislamchina.org\/?p=394"},"modified":"2014-07-27T19:27:26","modified_gmt":"2014-07-27T19:27:26","slug":"paper1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.soundislamchina.org\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"Internet rumours and the changing Uyghur religious soundscape: the case of the Snake-Monkey Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rachel Harris \u00a0<\/strong>(SOAS, University of London)<\/p>\n

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Uyghur woman in Urumchi wearing ‘Arab-style dress’ (courtesy of\u00a0Aziz Isa<\/strong>)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Uyghur area of \u00dcr\u00fcmchi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, has undergone a striking transformation over the past few years. It is visibly, and contentiously, marked by women\u2019s choice of dress: numerous young women can now be seen on the street fully covered in what is locally known as the \u201cArab style\u201d of loose black robes and the niqab<\/i> facial veil. Most restaurants have stopped selling alcohol where before Uyghur men sat openly drinking strong Chinese liquor. The changes in the soundscape are also striking. Stalls on the street openly sell books to teach the basics of daily prayers and Qur\u2019anic recitation, alongside Islamic talismans and charms. Recorded nasheed<\/i> religious songs, some sung in Arabic or English, can be heard from many of the restaurants, and on Friday at noon, the sound of the sermon from the mosque, never previously audible, is carried by loudspeakers out into the surrounding streets. The garden of the mosque is crowded with men praying. On the pavement outside, boys sell prayer mats and surreptitiously show to interested customers an array of underground religious Video CDs (VCDs).<\/p>\n

These kinds of religious media have been a frequent target of police campaigns over the past two decades, but in spite of, or perhaps in part because of the fierce restrictions, new forms of Islamic ideology have been disseminated within Uyghur society since at least the late 1980s, and since 2009 appear to have achieved a tipping point. In autumn 2013 we saw news reports of a new crackdown on jihadi propaganda online:<\/p>\n

“Xinjiang police were investigating 256 people for spreading \u201cdestabilising rumours\u201d online, the Xinjiang Daily newspaper said. Of those, 139 spread rumours about jihad, or Muslim holy war, or other religious ideas. More than 100 had been detained.”\u00a0(http:\/\/euronews.com<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>report: ‘China: Police target online jihad talk amid rumour crackdown’)<\/p>\n

In order to better understand the nature of specifically religious internet rumours that circulate in Uyghur cyberspace, and the way they relate to the wider social changes occurring in Uyghur society, I argue that we need to trace the ways in which particular media items circulate, and the discourse which accrues around them, and the new structures of feeling that they inculcate in Uyghur society. This paper presents one example: the case of the Snake-Monkey-Woman.<\/p>\n

In summer 2012 an online video was circulating. In the village where I was conducting fieldwork girls and women were frightened.\u00a0 The nine year old daughter of our host family refused to go to the toilet (which lay at the end of the garden) at night in case the \u201csnake woman\u201d fell on her from the tree branches. Her mother asked me if such monsters really exist. The meaning of the video was variously interpreted by people we knew in the locality, but the dominant story emerged thus:<\/p>\n

These were the remains of a wealthy \u00dcr\u00fcmchi business woman who was fond of parties and dancing. Her husband sent her on the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj<\/i>) three times but she wouldn\u2019t give up her bad habits. One night she came home late. Her husband asked, \u201cWhat have you been doing?\u201d She said, \u201cI have been dancing like a snake and jumping like a monkey\u201d.\u00a0 The next morning he woke up to find his wife had been transformed into a snake-monkey-woman. He had a heart attack and died. They took the thing to the main mosque in the regional capital \u00dcr\u00fcmchi, and it stayed there for several days until the government came and killed it by lethal injection.<\/p>\n

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