NF: Narratives of Islamic Revival:Chinese Secularity & Ban on Alcohol

Niagara Foundation is pleased to host Ruslan Yusupov,PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to speak on “Narratives of Islamic Revival: Chinese Secularity and the Ban on Alcohol in a Chinese Muslim town”.

This talk focuses on the controversy surrounding the ban on alcohol in a Chinese Muslim town of Shadian in Yunnan province of China. In 2008, the local government first supported and participated in the ban, but following the Kunming knife attack incident in March 1st, 2014, it declared that the ban is illegal. The talk tacks back and forth between, on the one hand, a form of Islamic associational life that local Muslims sought to forge through the ban and on the other hand, an analysis of the political form of governance that made the ban commensurate with the contemporary social engineering programs of the Chinese state. The talk brings into focus particular kinds of normative assumptions about time, religious act and ethnoreligious belonging in China with which the ban and the so called “rise of Islam” in China is perceived and interpreted. Situating the effort to declare the ban as illegal in the contemporary political emphasis on the “rule of law,” the talk suggests that creating “Islam with Chinese characteristics” contributes to the very ethnoreligious tensions that the Chinese state seeks to eliminate.
The talk will then be followed by a Q and A session and closed with open dialogue over tea and quick lunch.

Please contact Rana regarding questions about this event.