Religious blending along the Maritime Silk Roads : the case of Muslim's descendants in Baiqi village (Quanzhou City, China)

The religious contacts along the Maritime Silk Routes gave rise to multiple borrowings and religious hybridizations. The penetration of Islam in China, and increased contacts with Chinese cultures, witnessed several ritual reconfigurations whose effects are still noticeable today. In this short paper, I will discuss the case study of the village of Baiqi, near Quanzhou City in Fujian Province, where a Chinese lineage, the Guo clan 郭, performs a Chinese ritual with Islamicate characteristics. Indeed, the members of this lineage do not claim to practice Islam but mainly to be the descendants of Muslim merchants who settled in China's South-Eastern coast during the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1279-1368) dynasties. Since the fourteenth century, many of these merchants intermarried with local residents, gradually assimilating to the rest of the Han (Chinese) population. Today, they resemble their Han neighbors in almost every aspect. Many of them, however, still commemorate their foreign origin and, in some cases, even claim a separate unique identity. The ritual practices of ancestral worship are a central component of the religious and spiritual world of the population of Southeast China. The descendants of Muslims in Southeast China, like their Han neighbors, perform these rituals meticulously. Nevertheless, their worship has some unique features that include customs and taboos in the offerings which they present to their Muslim ancestors. In this presentation, I will discuss the specificities of this community, which are closely related to the history of the Maritime Silk Road in China, focusing on one ritual: the Qingming Festival (translated into English as the “Tomb-Sweeping Day”)