At first, I wasn't sure I understood the question.
I continued to look blankly at the middle-aged woman running the counter at the Islamic goods store, one of many in Xining's prominent Muslim Quarter. Sensing my confusion, the woman repeated her question.
"Are you Han or Hui?"
I realized that I had not misheard the question. I replied in the only way I knew how.
"Neither," I said. "I'm an American."
Now it was the woman's turn to look confused, as if she had not considered that this might be one of the possible answers to her question. Seeing that we were in the midst of one of those inevitable "lost in translation" moments, I attempted to clarify with a question of my own:
"Do you mean am I a Muslim or not?"
"Yes," she nodded affirmatively.
"Oh," I said. "Now I understand. No, I'm not."
After a slight pause, I added, "In America, we wouldn't ask that question using those words: Han and Hui."
"But Muslims are Hui, (穆斯林就是回民)" she explained.
And just like that, the conversation rolled onward, leaving behind the moment in which I was left to ponder about the imposition of Han and Hui as a dichotomy to stand in for the categories Muslim and non-Muslim. As I mulled this over in my mind, I realized that understanding the outlines of the ethno-religious landscape in Xining would require a bit of digging.
***
Xining is different from the other cities I've been working in. When I describe my project to my Chinese academic peers, I mention this fact when defending my case selection. In order to get an accurate representation of the Hui community, I have to make sure to examine a variety of different circumstances. In Jinan, I was looking into a minority Hui community surrounded by Han. In Yinchuan, I was looking into a Hui community in a city that was the capital of a Hui Autonomous Region. In both cases, however, the ethnic demographics of the community are fairly straightforward: Han and Hui comprise the two major ethnic groups in the city. Xining, however, is a multi-ethnic city, home to Han and Hui, as well as ethnic Salars, Tibetans, Mongols, Dongxiang, Tu (Mongour), and Bao'an (Bonan). This is one of the reasons why I chose Xining for a case study. Here, the boundaries of Hui ethnicity must be defined not only against the majority Han, but also against all of the other ethnicities that make up Xining's diverse population.
In a multi-ethnic community like Xining, dividing lines inevitably blur. Tu and Tibetan communities share a common Buddhist faith, while Hui, Dongxiang, Salar and Bonan are all part of the Islamic community. The Hui and Han share a common language in Mandarin, while the Tu and Mongols both speak Mongolic languages. Such similarities that cross ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries make it difficult to say where lines should be drawn and how they should be prioritized. A major example comes when looking at how Xining's Muslim community identifies itself and others.
China's Islamic community is almost entirely Sunni. Thus, China is free from a lot of the Sunni-Shi'a sectarian strife that plagues other parts of the Islamic world. Perhaps its for this reason that Chinese Islam has developed its own internal divisions. Most notably, the Chinese Islamic community breaks down along a dividing line between two major schools of Islamic thought: The Old School (老教) and the New School (新教). The two offer different takes on Islamic ritual and (in some cases) theology.
The New School is also known as Yihewani (伊赫瓦尼), the Chinese translation of the Arabic Ikhwan. Yihewani mosques communities root their ritual and theological system in Qur'anic tradition. The school emphasizes a ritual that is stripped down to the basics as is described in the Qur'an. When I ask respondents about what defines an Yihewani community they usually emphasize two things. "The Yihewani prayer services are far more simple than the Old School," one man, a Hui community organizer, told me. Another respondent, a tour guide at the Dongguan Grand Mosque in the center of town, explained that, "The Old School has adopted some Chinese customs in their prayers" and emphasizing that these rituals came from outside the Qur'anic tradition. Burning incense in the mosque, and memorializing the anniversaries of the deaths of family members were traditions taken from native Chinese religions like Daoism and Confucianism. These actions are frequently cited by Yihewani congregants as practices that the Old School gets wrong. Further, Yihewani congregants sometimes remark that Old School adherents improperly pronounce Qur'anic Arabic, relying on a Chinese pidgin to recite the Qur'an by using Chinese characters to approximate the sound of Arabic words. One interviewee, a businessman from Lanzhou, who I met in 2014 during a visit there, remarked that even though he couldn't understand the Arabic that he was reading, he could still take pride in the fact that his pronunciation was standard and correct.
The Old School is more confusing. Much more so. While lots of China's Muslims identify as "Old School," or Gedimu (各地亩), from the Aarabic Qadim. the group itself subdivides into various Sufi orders or lineages called menhuan (门宦). These groups are numerous: Khufiyya, Jahriyya, Qadariyya. The Yihewani community frowns on these lineages of Islamic thought that flow from a particular Sufi Muslim saint, but the Old School embraces them. Tombs of these saints have become the sites of veneration. The elaborate mausoleum, or gongbei (拱北), of an Arabian Sufi master from the late Qing Dynasty, which is perched atop the hills to the south of Xining, is a testament to the importance of these institutions, even in cities like Xining, which is primarily Yihewani. It's hard to pin down where these lines overlap. Some respondents have told me that The Old School and Gedimu are synonymous, while others insist that Gedimu is not an overarching category but is, itself, another Old School menhuan like the others (I have been corrected when using Old School and Gedimu interchangably. I have also been corrected when not doing so).
The differences between the sects, ritually speaking, is difficult for me to catch as a non-Muslim, but the impact they have on the community is not difficult to understand. While recent years have blunted the divisions between the two schools, and the arrival of very conservative, Salafist mosquses in Xining has yet again changed the religious landscape yet again, respondents can recall a time when tensions between Old and New Schools were significant. Marrying outside of the school was a common cause for disowning family members. Restaurants and businesses of the opposite group were not patronized. Further back, some respondents inform me, in the period before the establishment of the current People's Republic of China, the split between Old and New schools was even a source for violence in the community. Tempers aren't what they used to be. The community largely co-exists now, but the divisions have not totally lost significance. Old and New School Muslims still don't worship together.
But what is notable about the Old/New School split is that it overrides ethnic divisions within the community. Salars and Hui might speak different languages (Salar is a Turkic language related to Turkmen, and Uyghur), but both Salar and Hui interviewees have told me that these differences simply do not matter within Xining's Islamic community. "Yes, there might be some communication issues because the Salar have their own language," a retired Hui businessman told me, "but fundamentally we all believe in the same God, and read the same Qur'an." In many cases, this leads to conversations like the one in the vignette that begins this post. Hui becomes used as a stand-in for "Muslim" more generally. Thus, in some conversations, even Salar and Dongxiang and other minority groups get labeled as "Hui" because the respondent uses Hui to mean Muslim. Many respondents here have reaffirmed their belief that sectarian and menhuan divisions are simply more meaningful and important than ethnic ones.
In the end, this makes untangling ethnic boundaries in places like Xining far more complicated than in places like Yinchuan and Jinan, where the distinctions were binary: Han and Hui. Indeed, the Xining Muslim community is as much marked by internal divisions as external ones. Though the differences between Han or Tibetan or Mongol and the Islamic minorities may be significant, locals also invest attention and significance in the divisions within the community itself.