ABSTRACT
The voices and life-worlds of Chinese women of faith constitute the core of this book. They appear all too rarely in the otherwise broadly conceived canon of China-centred scholarship, including its feminist historiography. As members of the various main organized religions, which in the case of Islam also entails ethnic membership, these women have been rendered deficient in important respects by the official classificatory system that demarcates mainstream and marginal status, secular and religious and/or ethnic identity. Their religious faith has been practised under conditions of State-sponsored secularist ideology which, since Communist rule was established in 1949, predicated enlightenment and progress on the rejection of ‘religion’ and the application of thought reform, by whatever means, to those adhering to religious beliefs and practices.
