ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter focuses on how women from central China's Hui Muslim communities have engendered a narrative that is rejuvenating their spiritual and social identity and worth, through re-engaging chants from an expressive tradition ruptured during years of religious persecution. Key conversations among ordinary Muslim women and women ahong offer contextual evidence of the significance of historical contingencies of time, place, and patriarchy for self-reflexive approaches to understanding how different generations of women felt and expressed aspirations, resilience, fear, and submission. Women have also learned to evaluate the significance of chants in daily existence and as a sonic archive testifying to an abiding, historical legacy of women's mosques. Women's reconnection with a precious sonic tradition, and its reintegration into collective ritual and social life today, allow for a more nuanced understanding and re-interpretation of the relational undergirding of Chinese Hui Muslim women's religious piety. It also uncovers the interconnectedness of historical spaces of silence with women's everyday voices and voices claiming legitimacy, with silence being a constituent part of the multifaceted web of languages through which women interact with, negotiate, bypass, and challenge complex social structures and sociality.
