Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

Inbunden, Engelska, 2014

579 kr

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For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past.Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints.Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2014-10-13
Mått162 x 248 x 26 mm
Vikt681 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor336
FörlagHarvard University Press
ISBN9780674598553
UtmärkelserWinner of John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History 2015

Tillhör följande kategorier

Religion: allmänt inom Filosofi och religion
Asiens historia inom Historia och arkeologi
Antropologi inom Samhalle och politik
Islam inom Filosofi och religion
Etnicitet inom Samhalle och politik

Rian Thum is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

In The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, [Thum] documents how the Muslims of the region now called Xinjiang understood their past in the three centuries before the Cultural Revolution. Then he explains how that historical identity was torn apart, by inside and outside forces, in the course of the 20th century… What makes Sacred Routes so valuable is its coverage of both the modern and pre-modern periods, taking us back before the Chinese conquest of Altishahr. This enables Thum to show what happened to the older cultural technologies of manuscript, shrine, and pilgrimage in the age of mass printing, competing nationalisms, and commercial tourism… Refusing to reduce his ‘biography of history’ in Altishahr to a simplistic binary of oppression and opposition, Thum instead leads readers beyond the familiar ideologies of modern times toward older ways of knowing and belonging. The empathy and magnitude of this humanist project show the experience of the past in a society few have tried to understand in its own terms… This is Uyghur history as everyman’s history.