Imagine a young Hui person saying, quite sincerely:
“I’m not really religious.”
Then lunch arrives, and pork is placed on the table.
“No, of course I don’t eat that. I’m Hui.”
There is no contradiction in the person's mind. Yet philosophically, the moment is difficult to classify.
If avoiding pork originally comes from Islamic religious law, is the practice still religious when the person no longer understands it as obedience to God? If it is followed because of family upbringing, does it become cultural instead? If the prohibition has become so familiar that eating pork simply feels wrong, has religion transformed into bodily habit? And if abandoning that habit feels like abandoning part of one's Hui identity, where exactly does religion end and ethnicity begin?
These questions become even more complicated when the practices concern health and the body.
A Hui Muslim may trust a physician rather than an imam for information about cardiovascular disease, yet continue to follow Islamic dietary rules. Someone may rarely pray but fast during Ramadan with their family. Another person may describe themselves as nonreligious yet expect a Hui Muslim funeral when they die. Practices involving food, cleanliness, illness, fasting, and death can simultaneously belong to religion, family, culture, health, and identity.
Perhaps the difficulty lies in the question itself.
We often assume that a practice must be either religious or secular, as though a clear border separates the two. My earlier philosophical research questioned precisely this assumption. Attempts to define religious belief through one necessary feature—its supernatural content, its source, its intensity, or its relationship to transcendence—repeatedly produce exceptions. Instead, I argued for a polythetic understanding of religion: religious phenomena may form a family through overlapping characteristics without sharing one universal essence.
Looking at Hui life makes this philosophical problem unexpectedly concrete.
Among the Hui, religion does not always disappear when explicit belief weakens. Sometimes it changes location.
It moves from doctrine into food. From obligation into habit. From theology into family expectation. From religious law into ideas about what may enter the body. From beliefs about death into the way a body is washed and buried.
The more closely these practices are examined, the harder it becomes to answer the question “Is this religious?” with a simple yes or no.
1. Why a Clear Definition of Religion Begins to Fail
It is tempting to define a religious practice by asking whether the person performing it believes in God.
That works reasonably well for certain obvious cases. Someone performs the daily prayers because they believe prayer is required by Allah; the practice seems straightforwardly religious.
But many real lives are less tidy.
Religion scholars have long struggled with this problem because none of the most obvious definitions works universally. A definition based entirely on belief in a personal God would awkwardly handle some Buddhist traditions. A definition based on supernatural content becomes difficult when secular commitments organize a person's entire moral world in ways resembling religion. A definition based on intensity fails because people can be intensely committed to many things that are not normally called religious.
This was the central problem in my original philosophical essay. Drawing on Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance, I argued that religion may resemble the concept of a “game”: there is no single feature shared by every instance, yet overlapping similarities make the category meaningful and recognizable.
A religious practice, then, might acquire its character through several dimensions at once.
For studying Hui cultural life, I find four particularly useful:
Belief: Does the individual understand the practice through Allah, Islamic obligation, purity, sin, or religious meaning?
Community: Is the practice taught, expected, or reinforced by family, mosque, elders, or other Hui Muslims?
Tradition: Is it historically rooted in Islam and recognized as part of Muslim practice?
Embodiment: Has it become incorporated into repeated bodily behavior—eating, washing, fasting, caring for illness, or treating the dead?
These dimensions do not always appear together.
That is precisely what makes Hui life so useful for thinking about the boundary between religion and culture.
2. Pork Without Theology
Food provides perhaps the clearest example.
For many Hui people, avoiding pork is among the most recognizable markers of identity. Islamic dietary teaching provides an obvious religious origin, yet contemporary qingzhen food practices carry meanings extending well beyond doctrine.
Research on Chinese Muslim understandings of qingzhen, the Chinese term commonly associated with halal practice, has found that food can express concerns about ethnicity, community membership, trust, and social boundaries in addition to religious observance. citeturn156383search3turn156383search9 Recent scholarship likewise describes halal food among Hui Muslims as simultaneously materializing religious commitment and ethnic difference: eating becomes one of the most persistent ways a distinct Hui Muslim identity is maintained within a largely Chinese-speaking cultural environment.
This matters because the same dietary action can emerge from very different inner states.
Consider several people who all refuse the same piece of pork.
One refuses because the Qur'an prohibits it.
Another says that eating it would make them feel they had violated something inherited from their parents.
Another simply says, “We have never eaten this in my family.”
A fourth may not even experience the decision as a decision. Pork does not register as food in the same way that beef or lamb does.
Outwardly, all four behaviors look identical.
Internally, however, their relationship to religion is quite different.
The first practice is strongly connected to explicit belief.
The second is connected to family and identity.
The third functions primarily as tradition.
The fourth has become embodied habit.
Which one is religious?
A binary definition demands that we choose. A family-resemblance model allows us to notice instead that religiousness can persist through different combinations of belief, inheritance, community, and bodily practice.
This is particularly important when thinking about health.
Eating is one of the most basic ways humans care for their bodies. Religious dietary law therefore enters daily bodily life with unusual frequency. People do not have to enter a mosque to encounter it. Every meal provides another occasion on which inherited religious distinctions can be reproduced.
After enough repetitions, the body may remember a boundary even when the person no longer consciously thinks about the theology that created it.
Religion has not necessarily vanished.
It has become habitual.
3. When the Body Remembers
The same process can happen through other bodily practices.
Fasting during Ramadan, for example, can be understood as obedience to a religious obligation. But ethnographic research among Hui Muslims also shows that piety is embedded in social relationships and does not always take the form of isolated individual belief. Family members can help one another maintain religious practice, transmit knowledge, and care for each other's religious lives.
This means that a person may fast for several reasons at once.
Because they believe.
Because their parents fast.
Because breaking the fast together is one of the moments when the whole family gathers.
Because Ramadan marks a rhythm they have known since childhood.
Because not fasting would produce an uncomfortable sense of separation from a community to which they still feel they belong.
These motivations cannot easily be separated into “religious” and “cultural” boxes.
And perhaps they do not need to be.
Religious identity itself can be formed through repetition.
A child does not necessarily begin with theology and then derive every practice from it. More often, they encounter practices first: a particular food is not eaten; adults wash before prayer; relatives gather during particular festivals; certain words appear around illness and death. Only later might the theological explanations behind those practices become fully understood—or perhaps they never do.
From this perspective, the body can become a carrier of religious memory.
It knows when not to eat.
It recognizes certain foods as familiar.
It learns the physical rhythm of fasting.
It participates in washing, prayer, visiting, caring, and burial.
Religion therefore need not survive only as an intellectual proposition such as “I believe that Allah exists.”
It can survive as a repertoire of actions through which a person has learned how a Hui body is expected to live.
4. Health Reveals the Limits of the Religious–Secular Divide
Illness makes this ambiguity even clearer.
It is easy to imagine religion and medicine as competing systems:
faith on one side, science on the other.
But actual Hui health behavior suggests a more complicated arrangement.
A study of urban Hui Muslims in Shenyang examining cardiovascular-disease information found that Hui respondents considered health organizations, doctors, and health-care providers their most credible sources. Religious organizations and leaders were among the least frequently used sources for technical cardiovascular information, although Hui respondents engaged with them somewhat more than Han respondents did.
That finding is useful because it prevents an overly simple picture of “religious Hui medicine.”
A Hui patient can trust a cardiologist's medical expertise without becoming less culturally Hui.
They can obtain biomedical information from a physician while following qingzhen dietary practice.
They can take prescribed medication while praying.
Their family can understand disease scientifically while also interpreting suffering through a religious or moral framework.
The mistake is assuming that all these practices are attempting to perform the same function.
A physician may answer:
What is happening physiologically?
Religion may help answer:
How should I live through what is happening?
A dietary tradition may answer:
What should enter my body?
Family practice may answer:
Who takes responsibility for me when I become vulnerable?
Community ritual may answer:
What do we do if treatment fails?
One body therefore exists simultaneously inside several systems of meaning.
This also makes the classification “religious health behavior” more difficult than it initially appears.
Suppose someone refuses a particular food while hospitalized because it violates qingzhen practice.
Is that a religious decision?
A dietary preference?
An ethnic accommodation?
A health-related behavior?
From the patient's perspective, these categories may not be separable.
The practice can occupy all four spaces at once.
5. Being Hui Without Being Equally Religious
This ambiguity also reflects a broader feature of Hui identity: there is no single way of being Hui Muslim.
Ethnographic work has shown substantial variation between Hui communities, even within the same province. Urban and rural location, local religious traditions, family histories, education, and differing understandings of Islamic authenticity can produce very different forms of Hui Muslim life.
Survey data presents another complication. Research on religion in China notes that formal measures of religious affiliation may miss people who participate in religiously influenced practices without describing themselves through formal religious categories. Pew Research Center explicitly notes this limitation when discussing survey data on Hui Muslim belief and practice.
That methodological problem is also a philosophical one.
If researchers ask:
“Do you have a religious belief?”
and someone answers no, we may classify them as secular.
But suppose the same person's diet, family rituals, vocabulary surrounding death, marriage expectations, festival participation, and preferred funeral practices remain deeply shaped by Islam.
What exactly has become secular?
Their theology?
Their identity?
Their body?
Their community?
These may change at different speeds.
This is why I think Hui identity is better imagined not as a switch between religious and nonreligious, but as several dimensions that can separate from one another.
A person might retain:
belief + ritual + community + habit
Another:
ritual + community + habit
Another:
community + habit
Another perhaps only:
memory + identity
None of these necessarily makes one person “more authentically Hui” than another.
They simply show that cultural inheritance does not disappear all at once.
6. When Religion Becomes Care
This becomes especially visible when health moves beyond treatment into care.
Medicine often focuses understandably on pathology: diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, and prevention.
But people who are ill need more than information about pathology.
They need meals.
Transportation.
Someone to sit beside them.
Someone to explain what the physician said.
Someone to decide whom to call.
Someone to know which practices matter when the patient's condition deteriorates.
Religious and family traditions can become significant not because they contain superior biomedical knowledge, but because they organize relationships around vulnerability.
Recent ethnographic research describes this dimension of Hui life as “caring for piety”: religious life is maintained through relationships in which family members and others help one another perform, remember, and preserve practices. As patterns of mobility and community life change, these networks of religious care may extend beyond immediate kin.
I find the word care particularly useful.
It prevents us from reducing religion either to abstract belief or to rigid rules.
Religious practice can also be something people do for one another.
A family member prepares appropriate food.
An older relative teaches a younger one what should happen.
Someone knows which person in the community to contact.
Someone remembers a ritual when another person is too distressed to think clearly.
In illness, this social knowledge becomes practical.
Religion lives not only inside the patient's beliefs, but in the relationships surrounding the patient's body.
7. Death: When a “Cultural” Practice Becomes Religious Again
Death may provide the hardest case of all.
Consider a Hui person who has spent much of their adult life relatively distant from organized religion.
They may rarely pray.
They may understand illness primarily through biomedicine.
They may not describe themselves as especially devout.
Then they die.
Suddenly, practices whose importance seemed faint during everyday life may become urgent.
How should the body be washed?
How should it be wrapped?
Who should participate?
What prayers should be performed?
How quickly should burial take place?
What language should be used to speak about the deceased?
At such a moment, practices that might previously have seemed like distant traditions can return with considerable force.
Why?
Part of the answer may be belief in an afterlife.
But that explanation is incomplete if some family members themselves possess uncertain or weak religious belief.
The ritual may also express responsibility toward the deceased.
It may represent continuity with grandparents.
It may reassure the family that they have cared for the body correctly.
It may publicly locate the deceased within a Hui community.
It may simply feel impossible to do otherwise.
Death therefore reveals something important about inherited religion.
A practice can remain authoritative even when the individual cannot fully explain why.
The authority may no longer come from theology alone.
It may come from the combined force of belief, ancestry, family expectation, communal recognition, bodily custom, and memory.
In my original philosophical framework, this is exactly what a polythetic category predicts: no single feature determines membership, but several overlapping features together create something we still recognize as religious.
A Hui funeral can remain recognizably Islamic even when not every participant possesses equally strong Islamic belief.
The religion exists partly between them.
8. From Three Dimensions to Four
My earlier philosophical essay proposed three dimensions for understanding religious belief: structural, relational, and classificatory.
Structurally, a belief can organize other commitments.
Relationally, it exists within a community that treats it as authoritative.
Classificatorily, it is recognized by a religious tradition or makes a characteristically religious claim.
Studying Hui life makes me want to add something that abstract philosophy did not originally capture strongly enough:
embodiment.
Religious life does not occur only through beliefs about the world.
It happens through bodies that eat certain foods thousands of times.
Bodies that become hungry while fasting.
Hands that wash.
Mouths that learn particular words.
Families that care for sick bodies.
Communities that wash dead bodies.
These repetitions matter because human beings do not inherit culture only intellectually.
We inherit ways of moving through the world.
A religious rule may therefore follow a path like this:
doctrine → ritual → repetition → habit → identity
At the beginning, someone may perform the practice because they know precisely what it means.
Several generations later, a descendant may perform the same practice and simply say:
“That's what we do.”
It would be tempting to interpret this as religion fading away.
Sometimes it may be.
But sometimes something more interesting has happened:
religion has become culture.
9. Religion Does Not Disappear All at Once
This distinction matters particularly when discussing younger or less observant Hui people.
There is a tendency to narrate cultural change as a simple story:
older generations were religious;
younger generations are modern;
therefore tradition disappears.
Actual cultural change is rarely so clean.
Research on Hui identity repeatedly shows negotiation rather than simple replacement. Hui Muslims combine and contest different ideas about religious authenticity, ethnic belonging, modernity, local custom, and family life. Recent ethnographic work similarly describes religiosity and ethnicity among Hui Muslims as deeply entangled rather than easily separable.
A practice can weaken in one dimension while remaining strong in another.
Prayer may decline while dietary boundaries remain.
Theological knowledge may fade while festival gatherings persist.
Mosque attendance may become less frequent while burial expectations remain powerful.
Religious language may become less understood while certain expressions continue to sound natural within a family.
In health, biomedical authority can grow without eliminating religious interpretations of suffering or inherited food practices.
Instead of asking whether Islam has “survived” or “disappeared,” it may therefore be more useful to ask:
Where has it moved?
10. Between Faith and Habit
This returns me to the philosophical question with which I began.
What makes a Hui practice religious?
There is no single answer.
A practice may be religious because someone performs it in obedience to Allah.
It may be religious because an Islamic community recognizes and teaches it.
It may be religious because it developed historically within Islamic tradition.
It may remain partially religious because generations of repetition have embedded it in bodies, families, language, and expectations even after explicit belief becomes uncertain.
None of these criteria works perfectly alone.
Together, however, they describe why the boundary between religion and culture feels so porous.
My original philosophical essay concluded that religious belief is better understood through degrees and overlapping relationships than through one strict essence. Hui life suggests that the same may be true of religious practice.
This does not mean everything cultural is secretly religious.
Nor does it mean every Hui person should be understood through Islam.
It means only that centuries of religious life leave traces that cannot always be erased by changing one variable called “belief.”
Those traces may survive in food.
In bodily discipline.
In ideas of cleanliness.
In family care.
In responses to illness.
In the treatment of the dead.
In the strange certainty with which someone who doubts almost everything else can still say:
“No. We don't do that.”
Conclusion: Where Religion Goes
Perhaps religion does not always disappear when people stop believing in exactly the way their grandparents did.
Sometimes it migrates.
From doctrine into language.
From command into habit.
From scripture into food.
From ritual into family memory.
From belief about the body into ways of caring for the body.
And once this happens, the distinction between faith and culture becomes much harder to draw.
That difficulty should not necessarily be treated as a problem requiring a sharper definition.
It may instead tell us something important about how culture works.
Human beings rarely inherit entire philosophical systems intact. We inherit fragments: a phrase, a recipe, a prohibition, a gesture, a funeral, an expectation, a feeling that something is clean or unclean, appropriate or inappropriate, ours or not ours.
Somewhere inside those fragments may remain a religious history.
A person may no longer be able to explain exactly why a practice matters and still feel that abandoning it would mean losing something of themselves.
For Hui life, this is especially visible around the body because the body repeats culture every day. It eats. It becomes sick. It receives care. It grows old. It dies.
And at each of these moments, beliefs inherited centuries ago can reappear—not always as theology, and not always as conscious faith, but as ways of living that still carry the shape of religion.
Perhaps the most useful question, then, is no longer:
Is this religious or cultural?
It is:
How has religion become culture here—and what does the body remember after belief begins to change?
