I first began thinking seriously about religious faith through a word that seemed, at first, almost too ordinary for religion: reassurance.
I had encountered the word while studying European religious history. What interested me was not simply what believers believed to be true, but what believing allowed them to do. A doctrine might explain the universe, but it could also make an uncertain life more inhabitable. It could give someone a way to understand suffering, a set of actions to perform when frightened, or simply a ground on which to stand when circumstances themselves offered none.
Later, the idea became personal. I am Hui. My family’s hometown is Yinchuan, but I was raised in Shenzhen, one of the most modernized cities in China, far from the mosques, halal kitchens and religious rhythms that shaped my relatives’ lives. When I began interviewing Hui Muslims in Yinchuan and in Tongxin, I was not entirely an outsider, but I was not entirely an insider either. I continued these conversations with Muslim believers in Hong Kong and with a Muslim professor of mine in the United States. Each place showed me a different answer to the same question: what does faith do for the people who live by it?
The answer became concrete in the sitting room of a house in the Ningxia countryside, where an elderly Hui woman told me about the period when her father had cancer. She did not describe faith as something that had made the cancer disappear, nor as a substitute for treatment. Instead, she spoke about how belief had accompanied the family through the illness.
As I understood her, her trust in Allah meant the illness was not meaningless, even when it was frightening. When she spoke of her relief at seeing her children inherit the faith and take fasting seriously, she seemed to be looking past her father’s illness toward what would continue beyond it: the family would remain a Muslim family, and the practices he had lived by would not end with him. Her conviction that anyone who sincerely recognized their mistakes could be forgiven was not an abstract theological point either. For a family facing serious illness, repentance meant that whatever had gone wrong in a life did not have to remain unresolved.
What stayed with me was the steadiness with which she spoke. Illness had remained illness; fear had remained possible. Yet neither seemed capable of making the world completely unintelligible to her
This, I began to realize, is one way religious belief becomes part of Hui cultural life. Faith is not important only because it answers theological questions about God. It also gives shape to experiences that would otherwise resist explanation: sickness, uncertainty, aging, guilt, separation and death.
That does not mean Hui Muslims respond to illness by rejecting modern medicine. Research on urban Hui communities complicates such a simple opposition. In a study of cardiovascular-health information among Hui Muslims in Shenyang, respondents placed the greatest trust in doctors, health-care providers and professional health organizations; religious leaders were among the least trusted sources of medical knowledge. Religious belief and biomedical treatment therefore seem to occupy different roles rather than competing for the same one.
Medicine may answer: What is happening to the body, and what can we do about it? Faith may instead help answer a different set of questions: How should I endure what is happening? What obligations do I still have toward my family? How should I understand suffering that cannot be completely controlled? What does death mean when medicine can do no more?
This distinction helps me understand the woman I interviewed. Her faith did not give her technical knowledge about cancer. It gave the experience of cancer a place within a larger understanding of life.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz described something similar in his essay “Religion as a Cultural System.” He argued that religion confronts what he called the problem of meaning: the points at which experience threatens to become unintelligible, when explanation fails, when suffering becomes unbearable, or when the moral order seems to break down. In his account, religion does not remove these problems. It addresses not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make pain into something a person can endure. That is close to what I heard in that sitting room. The cancer was not explained away. It was made livable.
I want to be careful here, however. Describing faith by what it does for people, through comfort, structure and community, risks implying that this is all faith is. The woman I spoke with would not have said she believed because belief was useful to her. She believed because she held it to be true. What I can describe from the outside is the work her belief did in her life, not whether that belief is true, and the two should not be confused.
A study by Ningxia scholar Zhu Guoming similarly describes birth, aging, illness and death in Hui Muslim thought as unavoidable parts of human existence rather than abnormalities that human beings can permanently escape. In this framework, bodily death is not understood simply as the destruction of a life but in relation to an afterlife. Not every Hui Muslim interprets illness this way, but such beliefs can change the emotional meaning of events that remain materially unchanged.
Illness is where faith is tested most visibly. But it is not where faith lives most of the time.
In Part 2, I turn from crisis to everyday life: the dinner table, the fast and the family
