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Paper long abstract:

Much of the scholarship on Xinjiang in recent years has focused on elites, often trained in the Soviet Union, and the role they played in making the modern Uyghur identity. However, these studies give us only a limited perspective on what “Islam” or, indeed, even “history” in the region can actually be construed to be. If one looks at not only what the elite and the well-educated were writing, an entirely different picture of what “Islam” and, indeed, “history” in the region starts to emerge. It is an Islamic history steeped in not only said Islam, but the very survival-work of the people who undertook it: mothers and children, butchers and bakers, very real people with very real physical and spiritual needs that were met in a variety of ways. It is the intersection of Islam and survival-work that is of interest here.

This paper argues that “ahistorical” documents like divination manuals and occult treatises need to be taken seriously in reconstructing what I call an “affective history” comprised of everyday people doing things that really mattered to them. It tries to shift the narrative of Islamic history in southern Xinjiang away from one focused on elites and the wealthy and to re-center it on the multitudinous individuals in the region who saw no tension between their everyday practices and being a good Muslim. It does so by examining one such manual of divination, both as a text and in context, and situating it as absolutely central to the histories of those for whom it was at once an important part of survival-work, devotion, and being able to walk through their world able to exercise agency within it.