La séance d'ouverture de l'Atelier Eurasie centrale 2024-25 aura lieu, à titre exceptionnel, le mardi 5 novembre 2024 au bâtiment Nord, campus Condorcet, en salle 5.001 (5e étage) et via le lien CNRS indiqué ci-dessous :

Code d'accès : KV5V5k.

Nous y recevrons CHANG Chung-fu, professeur invité à l'EHESS, qui interviendra sur le thème :

Sufi spiritual genealogies and their social and educational functions are perceived in two different ways in Northwest China. First, the lines of succession of local shaykhs have now become common knowledge, as well as the records of their ‘miracles’ and gnostic practices. The edition of these records and their circulation have been strengthening their follower’s sectarian identity and collective memory, becoming a means to obtain social resources against backgrounds of sectarian competition and succession struggles. It is in this context that the influential and contested Muslim writer Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948), a former Red Guard, has become a mouthpiece of the Chinese Jahri Sufi tradition. His Xinlingshi (‘History of the Soul’, 1991) has triggered controversy about the succession of shaykhs within the Jahrıyya, but constructed a dominant collective memory for this ṭarīqa with a tragic destiny. In his efforts to establish ‘the real history’ of the Jahriyya, Zhang has collected and translated secret documents including the famous Rashha, a major Jahri hagiographic record. At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, he discovered a manuscript of the text in eastern Gansu, and translated it from its original Arabic-Persian version into a new Chinese text published in Taiwan in 2021. This presentation will analyse this work and its current reception.

Au plaisir de vous y retrouver.

Stéphane Dudoignon, Agathe Guy, Léo Maillet, Lina Tsrimova