| Summary/Abstract |
This paper explores the ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Mainland China, focusing on Moon Lake Mosque (a historically significant mosque in Ningbo Zhejiang Province). Islam has a long history within China, but it is upon the CCP’s recent attempts to align Islam with ‘Chinese Socialist Characteristics’ that we explore here. Examining the propaganda around the mosque, we trace how tensions about Islam are both represented and (circum)navigated. These posters correlate aspects of Islam to the Socialist Core Values, but particular omissions of the original Qur’an secularize these passages in order to claim Communist Party moral guardianship and legitimacy. We demonstrate how the framing of this mosque elides its place in Ningbo’s past, and how the absence of representations of historic religious diversity exotifies the mosque and renders such diversity invisible. We argue that ultimately inherent in such Sinicization is the problematic question of what it means for religion to ‘be’ ‘Chinese’.
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