Abstract:

Sening yading eger ketse dilimdin / Wujudin bir quruq weyrandin artuq

If the memory of you left my heart / The emptiness of my life would be greater than ruins

This paper reflects on interviews with Uyghur followers of Naqshbandi Sufism living in exile in Istanbul and Dubai. They are part of a transnational community they term El Tesawwuf, and inheritors of an Islamic cultural and spiritual tradition which is oriented through an aesthetic radically opposed to the ‘spiritual civilisation’ (jingshen wenming) promoted under current government projects of ‘re-engineering’ Uyghur culture and history. Their approach to our ethnographic encounters was rooted in their own traditions of dewet (religious teaching) and helqe sohbet (gatherings held by Uyghur Sufi groups involving the recitation of zikr and sung hikmet poetry.) These modes of communication involve particular styles of speech and embodiment, citation of traditions of spiritual poetry, and vivid accounts of the sounds, rhythms, and ‘spiritual joy’ (rohi ghuzzur) produced in helqe sohbet.

Our interviews formed part of a tradition of remembering which they have nurtured through decades of suppression: a style of religious teaching that they sustained even during long periods of incarceration in the region’s prison camps. They convey decolonial forms of knowledge and ways of being defy imposed notions of modernity, nostalgically producing alternative sources of hierarchy and power (Gatling 2018), and creating transnational communities of affect (Kapchan 2013). How should an ethnographer listen to dewet, and what is the place of the ethnographer within the transnational circulation of memories of helqe sohbet?