Rachel Harris's Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam reminded me of my home in a remote and caring village community in Altishahr (southern Xinjiang). I can still hear my grandmother singing the hikmät following the morning prayer led by my grandfather and—outside my home—the village loudspeakers playing propaganda music and news, the hum of electric wires, and the sounds of birds, dogs, donkeys, and the occasional motorcycle, all mingling to create the beautiful harmony of where my family and I existed on the edge of two worlds. These are sounds that I grew up with, but until reading Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, I had never thought about the depth and layers of the meaning resonating through them and what their study can tell us about transformations in life, faith, and tradition. Through an intimate study of the lived practice and experience of Islam among a group of Uyghur village women in Altishahr, as well as fieldwork in Central Asia and online ethnography, Harris offers a critical analysis of sounds and their effects, and what happens when the state interferes with local soundscapes. What does it do to a culture, people, and landscape when their sounds are tightly controlled or silenced completely?

Harris organizes the book into seven chapters and two “interludes” in which Uyghur voices speak directly to the reader, marking transitions between the introduction (chapter 1); the first part of the book, which explores the dynamic “distinctively Uyghur Islamic soundscape” (chapters 2–4); and the later chapters, which focus on the transformation of that soundscape in a context of increasing insecurity and violence (chapters 5–7).

The first chapter, “Sound, Place, and Religious Revival,” establishes the distinct place of the Uyghur homeland by briefly outlining the long and rich history, revival, and diversity of Islam in the region, from the cities to the villages, the complexities of Uyghurs’ religious identities, and the distinctive influence of Sufi traditions and rituals. Here, Harris also sets out the key theoretical concepts (soundscapes, affective listening, repetition and rhythm) that frame her analysis of the changing nature of Uyghur Islam and embodied place-making through attention to sound. Interlude 1, “Rabiya Acha's Story,” encapsulates the enormous and sometimes violent transformations in everyday life and engagements with Islam that Uyghur elders—more specifically, women—have experienced since the 1950s.

Chapter 2 discusses khätmä, which are part of an extremely closed group of Qur'an recitation rituals practiced by women in southern Xinjiang. The incredibly intricate detail provided in Harris's ethnography means that it serves as a “time capsule,” recording rituals now banned by the Chinese state. Gaining fieldwork access to this region is notoriously difficult. During fieldwork between 2006 and 2012, Harris participated in the rituals as a family member as well as a researcher, and she highlights their importance to these women. She centers the women's role in the village as religious practitioners and captures the emotional intensity of their performance, “manifested in the women's copious weeping” (p. 41), which she situates in a scholarly discussion of body, music, and interaction in Islamic studies. By exploring microcosms of gendered religiosity and contextualizing them in Islamic discourse from the micro to macro, local to global, and theory to practice, Harris makes her work accessible to an interested public as well as scholars. Her unfolding of the complex and important role of büwi (female ritual performers) as community builders and healers spoke to me on a personal level. As a child, I was respected by the community because my grandmother was a büwi; this book has helped me understand why.

The poet and founder of the first Turkic Sufi order, Ahmat Yasawi (1093–1166), continues to play an important role in Uyghur culture and religion. Although he is generally not talked about in public, there is a Uyghur saying “Muhammad in Arabistan, Yasawi in Turkistan,” placing him almost on equal standing with the Prophet Muhammad. I was therefore pleased to see Harris dedicate her third chapter to the rich tradition of hikmӓt (Turkic-language prayers) attributed to Yasawi, which has continued among Uyghur communities despite state control and censorship. Based on an analysis of oral and written texts and music, Harris highlights the “diverse and complex forms of circulation that bridge the oral and textual spheres and traverse international borders” (p. 74). This chapter can be read in comparison with or as complementary to Rian Thum's research.Footnote ¹ Thum shows how the written becomes the oral, whereas Harris examines how oral and written texts (handwritten copybooks, published texts) interact and travel. Tracing the transnational circulation of hikmät through Turkey and Central Asia, Harris shows how büwis in Altishahr reinsert modern, authoritative printed versions “into traditional affective ritual performance” (p. 90), demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of Uyghur musical tradition. Ideally, I would have liked to have seen more in-depth discussion of Yasawi's works and why these texts are used so much in these rituals, but I value Harris's efforts to capture hikmät as a living tradition.

In her fourth chapter, Harris considers how Uyghurs in both Xinjiang and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) “avidly consumed, listened to, and imitated recordings of the recited Qur'an” (p. 103) in the early twenty-first century. By favoring Arabic Qur'anic recitations coming from the Middle East, which circulated via cassette, videodisc, and smartphone, their practice led to an intensive transition and transformation in the soundscape. Harris situates Uyghurs’ emotional engagement with and practice of listening to the Qur'an within discourses of longing (whether for the Islamic heartlands or Ugyhur homeland) and a global modernity centering Islamic and Arabic aspects that often countered the Chinese state-imposed vision of modernity. I particularly appreciate Harris's attention to how local identities “are forged across intensely interconnected worlds” (p. 105), constantly being reshaped as Uyghurs explore and express their relationship with their religion. This is highlighted with the example of a büwi reciting the Qur'an in Sudais style (p. 128), integrating Salafi sounds into (female) Sufi ritual practices frequently criticized by Uyghur revivalists.

Harris shifts the tone and direction of the book through Interlude 2, a poem called “Tutiwalidu (They'll Arrest You),” which satirizes the interjection of politics into every aspect of religious life through the launch of the state's anti-extremism campaign.

This leads into the next part of her discussion on the changing nature of Uyghur Islam in chapter 5, which focuses on the rise of social media—especially the Ündidar (WeChat) app—and how this enabled the circulation of religious media beyond Qur'anic recitations, including sermons, recordings, memes, and rumors, in the context of increasing violence and social instability. Like many other ethnographers, Harris has not been able to be visit the field since 2013, but through her pioneering use of digital ethnography, it is as if she never left. Through her deep empathy, care, and listening in this virtual space, she created a “field site” where she meticulously archived community voices in Xinjiang and among the diaspora—voices that have now been scrubbed from the internet (today it is virtually impossible to find any mention of religion on WeChat). By situating the Islamic revival among Uyghurs at the nexus of the rise of social media, global piety, and Uyghur nationalism, Harris not only illuminates its complexity (it was not the result of one thing) but also shows how, as a place of comfort and strength, mediated Muslim piety could become a form of resistance against state oppression. Of particular importance is her discussion of the narrative of social suffering (därd) in the Ündidar discourse of 2013–14 (p. 154) and how the circulation of recorded sermons “offered a solution to the painful reality in the religious purity, brotherhood, and sacrifice of the mujahidin” (p. 158).

Chapter 5 is crucial to understanding how the Uyghur community interacted with the state's anti-extremism policies and how state control quickly expanded from social media to places, bodies, thoughts, and emotions—a theme that Harris expands on in chapter 6, which conceptualizes the transformation and engineering of the soundscape in Xinjiang as a process of territorialization. Harris expands Emily Yeh's framework of state territorialization as “projects of self fashioning” that reengineer land, bodies, habits, desires, and emotions.Footnote ² Her discussion of the anti-religious extremism campaign as a form of sonic territorialization gives the reader a fresh understanding of state-mandated large-scale musical performances aimed at engineering expression by forcing Uyghurs to smile, sing Red Songs, or dance to “Little Apple.” Highlighting the complicated community relationship with song and dance as part of the Uyghur tradition and identity in the face of both Islamic revivalism and state coercion, she describes how images of dancing and smiling Uyghurs alienate some members of the diaspora community.

The final chapter, “Erasure and Trauma,” discusses the current situation in Xinjiang. As a Uyghur who monitors news about the state of my people every day, I learned nothing empirically new, but Harris's discussion of the reeducation camps, mass surveillance, cultural erasure, and human engineering made my heart ache even more having just read the preceding six chapters, which highlight the importance of Islam and music in Uyghur life and identity. Now, the repetition of Shahadah in hikmӓt rituals has been replaced by repetitions of Red Songs and a rich and complex cultural tradition has been disconnected between generations in the terrible “war on Uyghurs.”Footnote ³ Harris shows how the intensive human engineering and assimilation of Uyghurs could be understood in the broader global context of settler colonialism, a nuanced direction that more and more scholars are exploring. Like her, we all worry “how long it might last?” and “what will the experience do to them?” (p. 209).

Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam is a beautifully written ethnography. The intricately described khätmä rituals, hikmӓt texts, Qur'anic recitations, and sermons that made sense and gave meaning to people for generations are carefully contextualized within and make a significant contribution to the field of global Islamic studies. However, it is also an ethnography that has unintentionally come to serve as a documentary record of practices, culture, and a people that have been silenced in the Uyghur homeland. As such, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our current experience of disconnection, disruption, trauma, and erasure in a new dystopian reality that labels those practices “infectious diseases” (p. 218). Harris is a gifted writer and a brave, ethical, and empathetic scholar. This book and its nuanced methodologies should serve as a guide for other ethnographers, while its contents and musical notations will be valuable resources for cultural revitalization in a future that we all hope to see come to fruition.