Over the first two parts of this series, I followed one word, reassurance, from a history classroom to a sitting room in the Ningxia countryside, and from there to the kitchen, the fast and the family. I argued that for many Hui Muslims, faith offers not certainty about the future but a way of living through uncertainty. In this final part, I want to complicate that picture: there is no single way of being Hui, the environment in which Hui Muslims practice their faith is changing, and the clearest test of what religion offers comes at the end of life.
The idea of faith as shared knowledge may be particularly important for the Hui because there is no single, uniform way of being Hui. Ethnographic research has repeatedly shown considerable differences between Hui communities and individuals. Urban and rural life, migration, education, local mosque traditions, family histories and differing degrees of religious commitment all shape what being a Hui Muslim actually looks like. Ningxia alone contains several Sufi orders alongside other Islamic traditions. A Hui person may pray regularly or rarely. One family may fast carefully while another treats Ramadan more loosely. Some understand their Hui identity primarily through Islam, while others experience it through ancestry, food, family customs or community belonging even when personal religious conviction is weak.
My own interviews spanned this range: from the city of Yinchuan to the countryside around Tongxin, and beyond Ningxia to believers in Hong Kong and a Muslim professor in the United States, where halal food and daily prayer have to be arranged around a society that does not assume them. My own life, as a Hui woman raised in Shenzhen, is another point on that spectrum.
This variation does not make religion culturally insignificant. In some ways it makes its influence more interesting, because faith does not dictate an identical lifestyle to millions of people. People continually interpret it, preserve certain parts, relax others and decide which practices must remain as their surroundings change.
Those surroundings are not only social but political. Since 2018, Hui religious life, particularly in Ningxia, has been shaped by a state campaign to “sinicize” Islam. In Ningxia, this has meant removing Islamic icons and Arabic signs from buildings, as well as removing domes from mosques. Restaurants and food stands were required to replace halal labels that combined the Chinese characters for halal food with Arabic script.
The most visible confrontation came in Tongxin County itself. In 2018, officials announced that the Weizhou Grand Mosque would be demolished for lacking proper permits, and protesters gathered inside the mosque to prevent it. After dropping the demolition plan, officials first called for the domes to be replaced with pagodas, then for eight of the nine domes to be removed. By early 2020, the mosque had been “renovated” and stripped of its Islamic symbols.
The restrictions have reached religious education as well: one school principal in Ningxia reported being told that teaching Arabic to children violated official educational policy. The practices described in this series, choosing food, fasting and passing knowledge between generations, therefore take place in an environment where the outward signs of Islam are increasingly regulated. In that context, the quieter, domestic forms of religious life, such as a meal cooked at home or a fast kept within the family, may matter all the more.
Death makes these choices especially visible. An ethnographic study of death in a Hui village in Shandong found that funerals were not merely private moments of grief. They brought together families, mosque religious figures, neighbors and community expectations. Decisions surrounding the deceased could expose disagreements about religious authority and family responsibility, while bringing community members into intense interaction. The researcher argues that death rituals became spaces through which relationships among family, neighborhood, mosque and Hui community were reaffirmed, questioned and negotiated.
In Ningxia, as elsewhere, Hui funeral practice follows Islamic tradition: the body is washed, wrapped in plain white cloth and buried quickly, with the ahong leading prayers and relatives and neighbors gathering without needing to be told what to do. Thinking back to the elderly woman’s account of her father’s illness, I understood that this was part of what her faith had offered her. Whatever happened, her family would not face it alone or unprepared.
Religion here does something more complicated than promising an afterlife. It gives grief a social form. When death occurs, people do not have to invent every response from nothing. There are already words that can be spoken, people who should be contacted, practices that should be followed and a community that knows something about what comes next. None of this abolishes grief. What it can abolish, at least partially, is the terrifying absence of structure around grief.
This is why I now understand reassurance differently from when I first encountered the word in a history classroom. Reassurance is not necessarily the conviction that everything will turn out well. The woman whose father had cancer could not know that. A family confronting death cannot know that. A person fasting cannot make the future more predictable simply by refusing breakfast. Instead, religion offers another kind of reassurance: the assurance that even when what happens to us cannot be controlled, there remains a way to live through it.
There is something to do when morning arrives. There is a way of preparing food, and of carrying it on a journey. There are obligations toward parents and children. There are people to turn to with questions. There are practices surrounding sickness and death. There are moral failures that can be followed by repentance rather than permanent condemnation. Life remains uncertain, but it does not become formless.
Perhaps this is why, when I look at Hui culture now, I find the boundary between “religion” and “ordinary life” increasingly difficult to draw. Hui cultural life has developed through centuries of interaction between Islamic traditions and very different Chinese local environments, and contemporary Hui individuals, including those of us raised far from our families’ hometowns, continue to decide for ourselves what faith, ethnicity and tradition mean.
But for those who believe, religion can provide something remarkably concrete. It turns belief into rhythm, boundary, relationship and response. It does not necessarily tell a person what will happen next.
It tells them how they might continue living when they do not know.
