Introduction: redrawing and straddling borders: rethinking Hui experiences

Abstract

This special issue focuses on the Hui, Chinese-speaking Muslims in China, including those who identify themselves with the Hui, regardless of whether they conform to Muslim identities or practices, across space, ethnicity, language, religion, and culture. It investigates how the conventional “borders” for these categories, temporally or contextually defining the Hui, have been redrawn by their transboundary activities, such as migration experiences, the construction of transregional networks, negotiations over ethnic or religious identity, the translations of texts, and interreligious, interdenominational, or intercultural dialog. Thus, the special issue explores how the Hui people have straddled the institutionalized borders of classification to preserve a distinct space for their lives in China and, by doing so, have secured long-term survival through different political and cultural contexts. We regard the label of “Hui” not as an immutable entity but simply as a heuristic framework. We discuss how conceptual boundaries between “us” and “them” have been flexibly re-interpreted and re-expressed by the Hui people themselves.