Sino-Muslims, Networking, and Identity in Late Imperial China

Longstanding Natives and Dispersed Minorities

Shaodan Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032539683
• eBook ISBN: 9781040093276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book explores the everyday life of Muslims in late imperial China proper ("Sino-Muslims"), revealing how they integrated themselves into Chinese society, while also maintaining distinct Islamic features.

Deeming "identity" as practical, interactive, and processual, it focuses on Sino-Muslims' daily networking practices which embodied their numerous processes of identification with people around them. Through an evaluation of such practices, it displays how, since the early seventeenth century, Sino-Muslims vigorously formed and participated in popular religious and secular networks at local, translocal, and China-wide scales, including mosques, merchant associations, gentry groups, Islamic educational and publishing networks. It demonstrates how such networks facilitated Sino-Muslims to become more aligned with the tempo of change in Chinese society and imperial governance, and created for them more ingenious venues and means to identify with Islam. Ultimately it reveals how, by the first half of the nineteenth century, a sense of collectivity—with common knowledge, memory, and discourse—was generated among dispersed Sino-Muslims.

Utilizing Sino-Muslims' own records such as steles, genealogies, and Chinese Islamic texts, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative Muslim studies, Qing and early modern China, religious and ethnic identity, and professionals of Sino-Arab relations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transcription
• Note on Dynasties and Reigns
• Introduction
• 1 Becoming Natives and Getting Dispersed: Formation of Sino-Muslim Communities in Late Imperial China
• 2 Local Networks: Establishing Mosques as “Public Venues”
• 3 Secularized Management of Mosques
• 4 Local Networks and Beyond: Sino-Muslim Lineages and Worship of Islamic Ancestries
• 5 Transregional Networks of Sojourning Sino-Muslim Merchants and Gentry
• 6 The China-Wide Network of Islamic Schools and Creation of Chinese Islamic Knowledge
• 7 Chinese Islamic Book Printing and China-Wide Circulation
• 8 Forging Collective History and Memory of Sino-Muslims
• 9 Shared Gender Discourse and Practice of Sino-Muslims
• Conclusion
• Index