Discerning Space, Situating Self

Zhang Chengzhi is a well-known writer with multiple literary and cultural labels attached to his name, including educated youth writer, root-seeking writer, ethnic Hui writer, red guard, Muslim, fundamentalist, and spokesman for Jahriyya. Zhang is, however, famous for depicting three lands which have been considered to be fascinating images and primary backgrounds in his writing. This article proposes that the landscape is not merely background to serve his themes; instead it constructs an independent and symbolic world, while the inner world and outer world fuse together. Zhang discovers/represents the sublime landscape as a productive space to crystallize his idea of the sublime. In this way, landscapes effectively provide a material as well as a symbolic approach, allowing us to discern his sublime writing with a multicultural writing identity. This article aims to elaborate upon the ways in which Zhang transforms factual, natural, and geographical lands – as significant geographies to him – into aesthetic, ethical, ethnic cultural, and religious landscapes, how he imagines and constructs a cross-cultural sublime identity in both the local and global contexts, and in what way the representation of the sublime embodies his tactic of living and writing by transcending geographical, ethical, and cultural boundaries.

From Beijing to Palestine: Zhang Chengzhi's Journeys from Red Guard Radicalism to Global Islam

This article traces the intellectual evolution of Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948), a contemporary Chinese poet, novelist, essayist, archaeologist, and ethnographer, from Mao-era radicalism to Islamic internationalism. Allegedly the inventor of the term “Red Guard” in the context of the Cultural Revolution, he has remained an unapologetic defender of Mao and of the “Red Guard spirit” since the 1960s. In 1987, meanwhile, Zhang converted to an impoverished and ascetic sect of Chinese Islam, the Jahriyya, and since the 2000s he has become one of China's most prominent spokesmen for global Islam. This article explores how Zhang has reconciled his zeal for Cultural Revolution Maoism, on the one hand, with Pan-Islamist positions on the other. Although Zhang's stance suffers from undoubted contradictions and inconsistencies, his career and beliefs illuminate the complexities of the legacy of Mao's and the Cultural Revolutions, of Chinese intellectual dissidence, and of the contemporary trajectories of Chinese internationalism and global Islam.

Pen of the Jahriyya: A commentary on The History of the Soul by Zhang Chengzhi

China’s leading Muslim writer, Zhang Chengzhi, published in 1991 an historical novel about a Sufi Islamic community, entitled The History of the Soul. The novel covers the two hundred years leading up to 1919, the year of the May Fourth Movement that is conventionally considered as the beginning of modern Chinese history. During this period, the Sufi community that is the subject of Zhang’s novels, called the Jahriyya, was involved in a series of violent clashes with the Qing imperial state. The author weaves through his historical narrative of a Chinese spiritual community the story of his own spiritual crisis, which he underwent in the 1980s and finally overcame through his encounter with the Jahriyya.