Islamic Belongings to Chinese Society: Taboo, Tolerance and the Ban on Alcohol in a Chinese Hui Muslim Town

BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES

Islamic Belongings to Chinese Society: Taboo, Tolerance and the Ban on Alcohol in a Chinese Hui Muslim Town

ABSTRACT
This talk will focus on how Chinese Hui Muslim men and women living in Southwest China think about haram prohibitions in Islam. When confronted with alcohol in the course of daily life with others, they resort to the practice of staying away from haram that seems to depend on the presence of alcohol just as on its prohibited status. This practice results in the formation of ethical distance that links haram with the cultivation of such basic human virtues as tolerance and patience. Thus, not only the acts of these Muslims unsettle the purity/pollution binary prevalent in the anthropological approaches to taboo, but they also demand to reconsider how we think about diversity and coexistence in our increasingly divided world today. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sociocultural Anthropologist by training, Ruslan is especially interested in the problems of secularism and religion. For his Ph.D. degree which was completed in the Chinese University’s Anthropology Department, Ruslan did two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chinese Hui Muslim minority town in Yunnan province, investigating how local Muslim men and women go about responding to the pressures and predicaments of living Islam in contemporary China. Taking their effort at its focus, his dissertation offers an account of practices of mediation and ideas of collective living that undergird them.

ORGANIZER
The event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.