Between merchant network and memory work: Islamic cosmopolitanism along the Silk Road

Abstract

In the studies of Islamic cosmopolitanism in Asia, merchant networks and religious mobility have received much scholarly attention in the past two decades. Yet, more studies are still needed to understand how memory work—especially the historical memory of trauma among diasporic communities—contributes to the transnational connections in Muslim Asia. Situated in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this article focuses on how merchant networks and memory work contribute to fostering Islamic cosmopolitanism in Asia. Building upon fieldwork between 2015 and 2020, my ethnography reveals that remembrance rituals and survival narratives become entangled with the merchant networks as Sinophone Muslims move between China and Central Asia. While striving to preserve the memory of historical trauma through rituals, Muslim individuals and associations also selectively downplay the past of ethnoreligious conflicts through heritage performance. In other words, Sinophone Muslims turn to traumatic memory through both remembering and selective oblivion, which is key to facilitating connections beyond the official BRI discourse.