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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2009
In December of 1984, Zhang Chengzhi, a thirty-six-year-old ethnologist from Beijing and an important novelist in contemporary Chinese literature, reached a small village on the loess plateaus of northwestern China. An impoverished farmer, Ma Zhiwen, hosted Zhang during his brief stay and introduced him to the local community of Muslims who practiced Sufism, a form of mystical Islam. Night after night, the Muslim villagers sought Zhang out to tell him about events in the history of their Sufi order, the Zheherenye. Zhang learned that Zheherenye Sufis carefully cultivated historical memories reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century when the order was founded by a Chinese Sufi returned from Yemen. Since then, the order had been led by a murshid, the Arabic word for mentor or spiritual guide. During the last dynasty of the Chinese empire, which fell in 1911, the Zheherenye were often outlawed and clashed repeatedly with the imperial army in regional wars that the Sufis always lost. Interpreting their defeats as martyrdom, the Zheherenye narrated the lives of the successive murshid in their transmission of oral histories, but also in handwritten histories that were often written in Persian or Arabic.
1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel zu einer Philosophie der Zukunft and Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift (Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future and On The Genealogy of Morals. A polemic), 3d ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 65Google Scholar. Nietzsche emphasized “so far.”
2 The name of the order derives from their rich tradition of recitation practices, according to Wang, Jianping, Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 135Google Scholar; and He Kejian and Wanbao, Yang, eds., Huizu Musilin Changyongyu Shouce (Handbook of common terms used by Muslims from the Hui nationality (Yinchuan: Ningxia People's Press, 2003), 166Google Scholar. Zheherenye is the representation of Arabic al-Jahrīya with Chinese phonetic units. The name al-Jahrīya stems from Arabic jahar, meaning to express something aloud and publicly in reference to their praying practice. Zhang estimated the number of Zheherenye members as from four to six hundred thousand. See Chengzhi, Zhang, Xinling Shi (History of the Soul) (Canton: Huacheng Press, 1991), p. 5Google Scholar of the preface. Significant Zheherenye communities can be found in Beijing and in the provinces and autonomous regions of Hebei, Ningxia, Gansu, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Shandong, and Yunnan.
3 Chengzhi, Zhang, “Libie Xihaigu (Parting With Xihaigu)” Dalu yu Qinggan (The mainland and sentiment) (Jinan: Shandong Pictorial Press, 1998), 181–82Google Scholar. In the same essay Zhang glossed Farizo as “the will of Heaven” (tianming) (p. 178).
4 Ibid., 182–83.
5 Scholarship on Zhang is still scarce. In Chinese, see He Qing, Zhang Chengzhi: Canyue xia de Gulü (Zhang Chengzhi: Solitary sojourn under the crescent) (Jinan: Shandong Literature and Arts Press, 1997); Fayou, Huang, Shixing de Ranshao: Zhang Chengzhi lun (Poetic burning: On Zhang Chengzhi) (Nanchang: Baihuazhou Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Lirong, Ma, Cai zai ji pian Wenhua shang: Zhang Chengzhi Xin lun (Treading on several cultures: A new discourse on Zhang Chengzhi) (Yinchuan: Ningxia People's Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Min, Yan, Shenmei Langman Zhuyi yu Daode Lixiang Zhuyi: Zhang Chengzhi, Zhang Wei lun (Aesthetic romanticism and moral idealism: On Zhang Chengzhi and Zhang Wei) (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For scholarship in English, see Choi, Howard, “‘To Construct an Unknown China’: Ethnoreligious Historiography in Zhang Chengzhi's Islamic Fiction,” Positions 14, 3 (2006): 687–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Garnaut, Anthony, “Pen of the Jahriyya: A Commentary on The History of the Soul by Zhang Chengzhi,” Inner Asia 8 (2006): 29–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yibing Huang, “From ‘Orphans’ to ‘Bastards’: The Legacy of the Cultural Revolution and Contemporary Chinese Allegories of the Individual” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001); Jin Wu, “The Voices of Revolt: Zhang Chengzhi, Wang Shuo and Wang Xiaobo” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2005); Xu, Jian, “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History: Reading the Sublime Object of Humanism in Zhang Chengzhi's Late Fictions,” Positions 10, 3 (2002): 525–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Yang Wanbao and Jianping Wang both trace the Chinese maola to the Arabic word for “protector,” “lord,” and “patron,” which Wang transliterated as maulā and Yang as mawlā. Both gloss it as an alternative term for murshid, the leader of the Sufi order. See He and Yang, Huizu Musilin, 87–88; and Wang, Glossary, 74.
7 Zhang, Soul, 180.
8 Ibid., 181, paragraph breaks omitted.
9 Ibid., 273.
10 Ibid., p. 11 of the preface.
11 Ibid., 138.
12 Ibid., 13. The gloss of dunya in parentheses is Zhang's own.
13 He and Yang, Huizu Musilin, 2. See also the entry for al-ākhira in Wang, Glossary, 2: “the hereafter, world to come, the afterlife in paradise. In contrast with this world, dunya.”
14 On these conventional uses of dunya that differ from Zhang's, see, for example, He and Yang, Huizu Musilin, 32; and Wang, Glossary, 23.
15 Chinese imams and their students imitate the pronunciation of hundreds of Arabic or Persian key terms in jingtangyu with Chinese phonetic units. The phonetic imitation is often too vague to be intelligible to native speakers of Persian or Arabic. Uninitiated Chinese speakers cannot understand the language of mosque education either, not only because of the terms derive from Persian and Arabic, but also because the syntax follows Arabic syntax. Over the last three centuries, Mandarin has undergone dramatic changes while the language of mosque education has changed little. It is in this sense a linguistic fossil that has preserved parts of classical Chinese.
16 Zhang, Soul, 157.
17 Dunya has approximate corresponding terms in Mandarin Chinese, which Zhang also uses, for example, zhuoshi, chenshi, and sushi. Choosing dunya, Zhang escaped the grasp of established lexical and conceptual conventions and wiped the slate clean to introduce his own definition.
18 Ibid., 142.
19 I coined the neologism “activistic” because there is no adjective for “activism.” (“Active” is the adjective to “activity.”) Nietzsche did the same in German; see note 41.
20 Staten, Henry, Nietzsche's Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34Google Scholar.
21 Zhang, History, 210.
22 Ibid., 130.
23 Ibid., 130.
24 Ibid., 129.
25 Roberts, Tyler. Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 93Google Scholar.
26 Roberts, Contesting Spirit, 122.
27 Roberts, Spirit, 93. Within this quote, Roberts quoted from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 210, which he abbreviated as “HH.”
28 Zhang, Soul, 219.
29 Ibid., 279.
30 Roberts, Contesting Spirit, 122.
31 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus spake Zarathustra. A book for all and none) (Munich: German Paperback Press, 1988), 134, 312Google Scholar.
32 Zhang, History, 90. Howard Choy, “To Construct an Unknown China,” 699; and Jian Xu, “Radical Ethnicity,” 539 and 546, n. 27, also discuss Zhang's source critique, but in a different analytical context.
33 Zhang, History, 91.
34 Ibid., 92.
35 Ibid., 93, paragraph breaks omitted.
36 Ibid., 94, paragraph breaks omitted.
37 Nietzsche, Jenseits, 71.
38 Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 322–23.
39 Ibid., 323.
40 Ibid., 326. “Activistic” translates Nietzsche's neologism “aktivische.”
41 Ridley, Aaron, Nietzsche's Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 64Google Scholar.
42 Zhang, Soul, 114.
43 Chengzhi, Zhang. “Du Yehai Ji (Record of Passing through the Boundless Night),” in, Huangwu Yingxiong Lu (The barren path of the hero) (Shanghai: Dongfang Press, 1994), 115Google Scholar.
44 I am relying on Wang-Riese, Xiaobing, Zwischen Moderne und Tradition. Leben und Werk des zeitgenössischen chinesischen Schriftstellers Zhang Chengzhi (Between modernity and tradition: Life and works of the contemporary Chinese writer Zhang Chengzhi) (Frankfort: Peter Lang, 2004)Google Scholar. I also consulted Zhang's autobiographic remarks in his interview in Leung, Laifong's Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994)Google Scholar. Zhang describes how he coined the term Red Guard on page 221.
45 Zhang, History, 288.
46 I am citing the occurrence of these terms in just the Preface and the first one hundred pages following the Preface (out of a total of three hundred pages) to convey a sense of the centrality of these terms in Zhang's writing and thinking. Beyond their frequency of occurrence, these terms are close in meaning and thus echo and amplify each other. Zhuiqiu: Preface 9, 10, twice on pp. 11 and 12; First Gate and after: 17, twice 22, twice 23, 30, 35, 46, 66, 67, twice 81, and 100.
47 Ciji: Preface, 8; First Gate 16; jidong: Preface 1, twice 7; First Gate and after: 56, 90. Taozui: 16, 22, 81. Gandong: Preface, 6, 8, 10; First Gate: 12, 17, 49. Jilie: 54, 100. Jiqing: 78.
48 I see his willingness to live among the poor and his ability to build bridges across social difference as an important difference from the activism of many other public intellectuals of the 1980s. They isolated themselves from workers and farmers in their focus on debating how to move China out of the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. This is even truer of the students who made up much of the demonstrations in 1989. Their difficulties in connecting with farmers and workers greatly limited their challenge to the communist leadership's monopoly on political power. Zhang is in this sense much more dangerous.
49 Ibid., Preface, 11. Zhang combined here the most Maoist of slogans—“For the People”—with an Islamic expression he had learned from the Sufis: “I have fulfilled it,” in the sense of “I have made a religious promise become reality” (quan meile ta, literally, “I have made it completely beautiful”).
50 By contrast, Zhang did not place his hopes in the material prosperity that came with the economic reforms, nor in technology or democratic practices. Zhang's affirmation of rural life, of the poor, and of cultural difference also opened up a perspective on the economic reforms of the 1980s that differed from many politicized intellectuals at the time who valued the period for drastically raising living standards and for introducing at least a modicum of intellectual and artistic tolerance. Zhang on the other hand criticized the economic reforms for choosing Western modernity, progress, and material prosperity over the ideals that Zhang had cherished under Mao. In this sense, it is justified to read History of the Soul as directed against “Deng's capitalism” or neoliberalism.
51 Lixin Shao, Nietzsche in China (New York: Peter Lang), 71, also 55.
52 Ibid., 61, Shao's translations.
53 Ibid., 61, 71.
54 Ibid., 57.
55 The Chinese intellectual environment saturated with introductions to and increasingly also translations from Nietzsche might even have included Mao. Mao mentioned Nietzsche in a journal article that Mao published in 1919 at age twenty-six. See Shao, Nietzsche, 80–81. Mao's paradigm of the continuous revolution was central to initiating the Cultural Revolution. His irrational choice went against all rational, procedural, and utilitarian politics by destroying what he had produced and by unleashing (internal) war after having achieved and maintained peace. This paradigm was the result of Mao's appropriation of the notion of the “permanent revolution” from Trotsky. See Starr, John, Continuing the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 302–5Google Scholar; and Schram, Stuart, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Gillespie, in turn, has suggested that late-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries (who formulated the “permanent revolution”) and Nietzsche were part of a shared historical trajectory. See his Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 135–202. For example, the notion of a permanent revolution and Nietzsche's Dionysus both value destruction and chaos positively (ibid., 171–72). If this is true, one could even posit a direct line from Nietzsche through Mao to Zhang. Zhang would have internalized in the early Red Guard movement value judgments that had come to Mao (inspiring Mao's “continuous revolution”) from a European context of the late nineteenth century, which included and was to an extent shaped by Nietzsche.
56 Zhang, “Yehai,” 115.
57 Zhang loathed intellectuals' debates on humanism as self-serving and inconsequential. But I think it is no coincidence that he took up “humane” and “humanism” as key terms at a time when they were mentioned daily in magazines and newspapers. See Zhang, Soul, p. 10 of the preface; and Goldman, Merle, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 116–21Google Scholar.
58 Zhang, History, 85–86.
59 Ibid., 297.
60 Ibid., 92.
61 Ibid., 65.
62 Choy, “To Construct an Unknown China,” 688. In a single sentence, Choy does relate Zhang to a critique of authoritarian rule, but does not go on to develop this dimension of Zhang's critique: “Thus his humanism has two definitions: first, human spirituality is equated with religion, which serves … to critique consumerism; second, it means passive resistance to high-handed rule, as … in the Shifengpu suppression” (ibid., 701).
63 “Religion of the Poor” is the title of a section of “The First Gate,” and referred to the arid loess plateaus where Zhang first encountered the Sufis. Drought impoverishes Zheherenye farmers, so much so that the there is no hope Deng's reforms might raise their living standards significantly. Zhang makes the cynical implication that only if there is no hope for material gain can Chinese lead a religious life oriented toward abstract ideals.
64 Zhang, “Xihaigu,” 182.
65 Ibid., 65.
66 Ibid., 70.
67 I am grateful to an anonymous CSSH reviewer for pointing out this correspondence.
68 Zhao, Dingxin, The Power of Tiananmen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xxv, 147CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 Zhang, History, 70.
70 For anwei, compare my translation referenced with note 73.
71 The Chinese word aolate is a loanword from the Arabic word wird. Jianping Wang glossed aolate in his English glossary as Arabic “Wird. Specified time of day or night devoted to private worship (in addition to the five prescribed prayer times), a section of the Qur'an recited on this occasion; the verses selected from the Qur'an used and chanted during prayer (or recited after prayer) among some Sufi groups in China” (Glossary, 9). He and Yang did not include the word in their Chinese glossary.
72 Zhang, History, 183.
73 Jiwei, Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 203Google Scholar.
74 Ibid., 2.
75 Nietzsche, Jenseits, 78.
76 That the government banned the book does not necessarily mean that the authorities read it in relation to Tiananmen. They might simply have issued the ban out of a concern over its effects on Muslims in China. I thank an anonymous CSSH reviewer for this clarification.
77 Gillespie, Nihilism, 135–202.
