For the Hui people of China, religion is not practiced only through what one believes. It can also be practiced through the body.
It appears in what a person eats and refuses to eat; in washing before prayer; in fasting through the daylight hours of Ramadan; in the ways families respond to sickness; and, finally, in how the body is washed, wrapped, and buried after death.
Seen this way, Islam's influence on Hui life cannot be understood only by studying mosques or theology. Over centuries, religious beliefs have also entered everyday ideas about cleanliness, food, bodily discipline, illness, care, and death. Some remain explicitly religious. Others have become so embedded in family habit and Hui cultural identity that the line between religious practice, health practice, and ordinary life is difficult to draw.
This is particularly visible in Ningxia, where Hui communities have developed through centuries of interaction between Islamic traditions and Chinese society. My earlier research traced Muslim settlement in the region through the movement of Arab, Persian, and Central Asian merchants, soldiers, officials, and religious figures into China, especially along the networks surrounding the Silk Road. Over time, these communities became rooted in Chinese-speaking society while continuing to maintain Islamic traditions.
That long history produced something more complicated than the preservation of a religion brought from elsewhere. It produced a way of living in which faith became connected to the treatment of the body. The question that interests me, therefore, is: How does religious belief change the way people live inside, care for, interpret, and eventually part with their bodies?
1. The Body as Something to Be Cared For
One o
f the clearest connections between Islam and everyday Hui bodily life is the repeated importance placed on cleanliness.
Cleanliness in Islam is not simply a modern medical recommendation. It carries religious meaning. Before particular forms of worship, Muslims perform forms of ritual washing. Descriptions of Hui religious practice in China note washing of the face, mouth, nose, hands, and feet before prayer, while fuller purification involves washing the whole body.
From a medical perspective, it would be too simple to claim that ritual purification exists because it prevents disease. Its religious meaning is different from the germ theory of modern hygiene.
From a cultural perspective, however, repeatedly connecting bodily cleanliness with religious readiness matters. The body becomes something that requires attention.
Hands, mouth, face, clothing, food, and physical surroundings are not entirely separate from one's spiritual life. Caring for the body can itself become part of learning how one ought to live.
This relationship appears repeatedly in my earlier research on Ningxia Hui customs. Food is described not merely in terms of taste but also through ideas of cleanliness and purity. The dead body, too, must be carefully washed before burial. Religious life therefore marks both the living and dead body as something that should be handled deliberately and respectfully.
This makes health broader than the absence of disease. A healthy or properly cared-for body exists within a larger moral world: one shaped by cleanliness, restraint, respect, and responsibility.
2. Food: What Is Allowed to Enter the Body?
The dinner t
able may be one of the most visible places where Islamic belief enters Hui bodily life.
My original research describes how Ningxia Hui dietary practices traditionally prohibit pork and alcohol while emphasizing beef, mutton, poultry, fish, grains, and other permissible foods. It also records particular expectations surrounding slaughter, including the invocation of Allah and the avoidance of consuming blood.
At first glance, these may look simply like religious prohibitions: eat this; do not eat that.
But dietary rules do more than separate permitted and forbidden foods. They teach people to think about what enters the body. A meal therefore has several dimensions at once. It provides nutrition, but it may also involve religious legitimacy, cleanliness, family memory, trust in the person who prepared it, and membership in a community. This is one reason qingzhen, commonly translated into English as halal, has such importance in Hui life.
A qingzhen restaurant is not simply a place without pork. It can be a place where a Hui traveler feels confident about how food has been prepared. It can determine where a family chooses to eat, where relatives hold a gathering, or which restaurant a student searches for after moving to another city.
Something originally rooted in religious law consequently becomes part of the everyday geography of health and belonging. It can also survive changes in personal belief.
A younger Hui person may not know the theological reasoning behind every dietary rule. They may rarely attend mosque. Yet the habits surrounding food can remain extraordinarily persistent: checking whether a restaurant is qingzhen, associating beef and mutton dishes with family gatherings, or feeling that certain foods simply do not belong on the family table.
At this point, religion has not disappeared. It has partially migrated into habit. And because eating is something the body must do every day, dietary practice allows cultural memory to be repeated almost unconsciously.
3. Fasting: Health, Discipline, and the Experience of the Body
Ramadan makes the re
lationship between religion and the body even more explicit. For a period each year, fasting changes the ordinary rhythm of hunger and eating. The body that normally demands food at midday is asked to wait. Daily routines are reorganized around dawn and sunset. It would again be misleading to interpret Ramadan simply as a health practice. Muslims fast for religious reasons, not merely to produce a physiological benefit.
Yet from the perspective of medical anthropology, fasting is significant because it makes the body impossible to ignore. Hunger becomes part of religious experience. Self-restraint is experienced physically rather than abstractly. Time itself is felt through the body: morning means the beginning of fasting; sunset means that eating becomes possible again.
The importance of fasting was also visible in one of the Hui women I interviewed in Ningxia. When discussing her own family's faith, she spoke with particular relief and pride about seeing her children take fasting seriously. What mattered was not merely that they could explain Islamic teachings. Their willingness to reorganize their bodies and routines around the practice became evidence to her that faith had continued into another generation.
This illustrates something important about religion and health. The body is not simply the passive object that medicine treats after something goes wrong. It can also be the place where values are learned and demonstrated.
Through fasting, restraint is not only believed in.
It is felt.
4. When the Body Becomes Sick
The relationship between f
aith and health becomes more complicated when ordinary bodily discipline gives way to illness.
Here it is important not to romanticize religious belief.
Being Hui Muslim does not mean rejecting hospitals, physicians, pharmaceuticals, or biomedical explanations of disease. A study examining cardiovascular-health information among urban Hui Muslims found that participants placed high trust in doctors, health organizations, and professional health-care providers. Religious leaders were not their preferred source for technical medical information.
This distinction is essential. A doctor and a religion do not necessarily answer the same question This is something I began to understand through an interview with an elderly Hui woman whose father had developed cancer.
When she spoke about that period, she did not describe prayer as a replacement for cancer treatment. What struck me instead was the way faith gave her a framework through which the family could emotionally live alongside disease. Illness remained frightening and materially real, but it did not make existence entirely meaningless.
Research from Ningxia Medical University similarly describes birth, aging, illness, and death as understood within some Hui Muslim religious frameworks as unavoidable processes of human existence. The authors connect religious belief with broader Hui ideas surrounding health preservation and everyday health habits.
This suggests a distinction between curing disease and making disease livable.
Biomedicine may be more capable of addressing pathology.
Religion may shape what illness means to the person experiencing it.
Those functions can coexist.
5. A Medicine Formed Between Worlds
The interaction between Hui culture and health is not limited to religious responses to illness. It also has a medical history of its own.
Centuries of exchange between China and the Islamic world brought not only merchants and religious ideas, but also medical knowledge.
One of the most fascinating surviving examples is the Huihui Yaofang (Prescriptions of the Hui), a medical formulary associated with the Yuan period. Although only part of the original work survives, researchers have identified hundreds of drugs recorded using Arabic or Persian names alongside Chinese transliterations. Scholars studying the text describe it as evidence of interaction between Islamic medical knowledge and Chinese medicine.
Its importance goes beyond proving that “Hui medicine existed.” The text shows that medicine itself can travel between cultures. A medicinal substance may arrive with one name and be written in another language. A theory of the body may encounter another theory. A treatment from Western or Central Asia may be incorporated into a medical environment already shaped by Chinese pharmacology.
The body thus becomes another meeting place between civilizations. This long history eventually contributed to what is now often discussed as Hui medicine, a body of medical knowledge shaped through interaction among Islamic, Arabic-Persian, and Chinese traditions. Ningxia Medical University today even contains research institutions devoted to the study and modernization of Hui ethnic medicine.
Yet Hui medicine should not be imagined as a perfectly preserved ancient system practiced uniformly by all Hui people.
Contemporary Hui communities participate extensively in modern biomedical health care, traditional Chinese medicine, and other forms of treatment. Ethnobotanical research in the wider Gansu-Ningxia-Inner Mongolia region has nevertheless documented continuing local knowledge of medicinal plants, animal products, and mineral medicines, while also noting that some smaller traditions of ethnic medical knowledge are declining under modernization.
That coexistence may actually be the more interesting story. A Hui family today does not necessarily choose between “Islamic medicine” and “modern medicine.” Their health world may contain several layers at once: a hospital diagnosis, a pharmaceutical prescription, a familiar herbal remedy suggested by an older relative, dietary customs inherited from Islam, and religious language that helps the family understand what the illness means.
Medical culture is rarely as neatly divided as textbooks make it appear.
6. Health Is Also Social
Illness does not happen only to an individual body.
It changes families.
Someone has to accompany the patient to appointments. Someone prepares food. Someone asks relatives for advice. Someone explains what the physician said to an elderly family member. Someone decides when to visit.
This is one reason I find Hui religious and cultural practices interesting from a medical-anthropological perspective: many of them place the body inside relationships.
The mosque itself illustrates this.
My earlier research described the mosque not only as a place of prayer but historically as a center around which religious education, community gatherings, marriage, funerary practices, and other parts of social life could take place.
In such a setting, religion creates networks.
And networks matter during illness.
The importance of community does not mean every Hui patient experiences the same degree of religious support, nor that mosques function identically in every place. Urbanization, migration, different religious traditions, and generational change create enormous variation.
But the underlying point remains important:
Health is never purely biological.
A disease exists in cells or organs, but the experience of disease also unfolds through relationships—with parents, children, doctors, neighbors, religious communities, and inherited expectations about how a sick person should be cared for.
7. Language Changes the Meaning of the Body
Perhaps one of the most subtle ways religion shapes health is through language.
Hui communities in Ningxia primarily speak Chinese, yet my earlier paper records a vocabulary shaped by Arabic, Persian, Islamic concepts, and generations of Hui usage. Expressions such as Bismillah may accompany everyday acts such as eating, while other Hui-specific terms appear around religious and family practices.
The language surrounding death is especially revealing.
Instead of simply saying that someone has “died,” Hui expressions may describe the person as having 归真—returned to the True.
The body of the deceased may be referred to as 埋体, rather than with the more clinical Chinese word for corpse.
These are not merely euphemisms.
Words alter the conceptual world in which an event takes place.
“Corpse” describes a biological body after life has ended.
“Returning” describes a movement.
One word closes a biological process; the other places death within a religious narrative.
Medicine also depends on language in this way. Words such as diagnosis, recovery, terminal, chronic, or remission never simply describe biological facts. They influence how patients imagine what is happening to them.
Hui religious vocabulary does something similar from another direction.
It gives bodily events—including death—a cultural meaning.
8. Caring for the Body After Life Ends
This relationship between belief and the body becomes clearest at death.
My original paper describes Ningxia Hui funerary practices in considerable physical detail. The body is placed carefully after death and covered. Before burial, it is washed; traditionally, men wash male bodies and women wash female bodies. It is then wrapped in white cloth. Funeral prayers are performed, and burial generally follows relatively quickly. Coffins are traditionally avoided so that the body can return directly to the earth.
These practices can be viewed religiously. But they can also be viewed as a final system of bodily care.
When medicine reaches its limit and can no longer preserve biological life, the body does not suddenly become meaningless.
It still must be touched carefully. It must be cleaned. It must be covered. It must be accompanied. It must be returned to the earth in a culturally meaningful way.
This is one of the points at which medicine and religion approach the same human boundary from opposite sides. Medicine spends enormous effort attempting to maintain the living body. Funeral practice begins when that effort can no longer succeed. But both are, in different senses, forms of caring for a body.
The Hui preference for relatively simple and rapid burial also reflects a view in which death is not an occasion for indefinitely preserving the physical body. My earlier research describes human beings as returning to the earth from which the body was formed, while death itself is understood within a larger religious conception of human existence.
Religious belief therefore changes not the biological fact of death, but what happens around it.
It gives the family something to do when medicine has nothing more to offer.
9. What Remains When Belief Changes?
Contemporary Hui life, however, cannot be described as though every person follows all these practices in the same way.
My earlier paper already records visible changes across generations. Some forms of traditional dress have become less common among younger Hui, for example, while religious and cultural practices continue to adapt to modern urban life. The same variation appears in health and bodily practice. One Hui person may fast through Ramadan every year. Another may not.
One may pray regularly and perform ritual purification each day.
Another may rarely enter a mosque but still refuse pork.
Someone may know little about Hui medicine but immediately recognize the foods their grandparents considered nourishing.
Another may rely completely on a modern hospital during illness yet still want Islamic funeral practices after death.
This makes it difficult to measure the influence of religion simply by asking:
Do you believe?
Belief can leave traces after explicit religious practice weakens.
Perhaps those traces can be imagined as layers:
belief → ritual → bodily habit → family practice → cultural memory
A practice may begin as a theological command.
After generations, it can also become something a grandmother teaches a child without explaining its theology. It becomes the meal always cooked this way. The food never placed on the table. The washing performed before prayer. The phrase spoken before eating. The relative everyone calls when someone falls seriously ill. The word used when someone dies. The white cloth prepared afterward.
Conclusion: The Body as an Archive
When I first studied Hui culture, I tended to divide it into categories: religion, history, food, language, medicine, customs. The more closely I look at actual Hui life, the less stable those categories become. Food is simultaneously nutrition, religious practice, family tradition, and ethnic identity. Washing can be bodily care and spiritual preparation. Fasting is religious devotion experienced through hunger and physical restraint. Medicine carries traces of exchange between Islamic and Chinese civilizations. Illness is biological, but also emotional, familial, cultural, and sometimes religious. Death ends the body's biological life, yet begins an elaborate final process of caring for that body.
Perhaps, then, the human body itself can be understood as a kind of archive.
History does not survive only in books or monuments.
It survives in what people are willing to eat.
In what they refuse.
In what they wash.
In what they endure.
In the medicines they remember.
In the words they use for sickness and death.
And in the rituals through which one generation teaches another how a body should be cared for.
For the Hui, centuries of encounter between Islam and Chinese society have left precisely these kinds of traces. Some remain strongly religious. Others have become cultural habits whose theological origins may barely be considered in everyday life. Modern hospitals, biomedical science, urbanization, and changing generations continue to reshape them.
Yet even as practices change, they reveal something important about health itself.
To care for a human body has never meant only keeping it biologically alive.
It also means deciding what may enter it, how it should be treated, what suffering means, whom we turn to when it becomes vulnerable, and what dignity requires when medicine can no longer save it.
That is where Hui religion, culture, and medicine most clearly meet.
