Sermon Poems in Uyghurs and Huis: A Comparison Approach toward the Socioreligious Representations of Muslim Minorities in China

Abstract

In this paper, I mean to undertake comparison analyses on the religious representations appearing in the sermon poems composed by those mosque preachers both in the Uyghurs and Huis. By doing these, I aim at unfolding the process of the symbolic constructions in their sermon poems, and as a result, shedding lights onto their rich ways, different in literate styles and composition forms but similar in religious ideologies, to use Islam as a logic base. From the descriptions and discussions of this paper, we also can get useful information for understanding the Islamization of folk traditions in the localities of the Uyghurs and the Huis, and examine the methodological possibility of studying Muslim community constructions in terms of their universal Islamic identity.