Islamic China

An Asian History

Rian Thum

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674302266
• Subtopic: Chinese History

A deeply learned reassessment of the history of Chinese Muslims, who since the fourteenth century have been subject to a constant program of minoritization.

For more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland—as butchers, merchants, and farmers; diplomats, scholar-officials, and royal astronomers. Yet the Muslims of China have often been understood as inherently foreign, incompatible with Chinese culture. In this reappraisal, Rian Thum recaptures the ordinariness of Chinese Muslims. In doing so, he suggests that these communities, whose classification has so often been seen as problematic, can teach us about the ways social categories are made and maintained in the first place.

Firmly rooted in Chinese and long-neglected Perso-Arabic sources, Islamic China traces the interlinked histories of twenty Chinese Muslims, some famous and some obscure, spread across multiple ethnicities, sects, and centuries. Their stories—emphasizing the diversity of Chinese Muslim communities and their continuous exchanges with other groups both within and beyond China—cut through the flattening narratives that have obscured China's Muslim heritage. Taken together, the experiences chronicled here offer a fresh view of Islamic China, stretching across Central, Southeast, and South Asia—and of China itself.

While focused on the Ming, Qing, and early Republican eras, Thum also harkens back to earlier centuries and traces the inheritances of this history to the present. Islamic China makes the compelling argument that the abstractions brought to bear on the past have practical implications in today's People's Republic of China, where the state enforces an oppressive regime of differentiation and control aimed broadly at Muslims and is routinely exposed for atrocities committed against particular subgroups.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A Bird’s-Eye View
• 1. Two Ordinary Books: Ma Lianyuan and Nūr al-Ḥaqq
• 2. The Matrix of the Ordinary: The Textual World of Nineteenth-Century Yunnan
• 3. Extraordinary Books: Wang Daiyu and Long Ahong
• 4. The Matrix of the Extraordinary: Inter-Asian Muslim Networks of the Seventeenth Century
• 5. Origins Identify: Lan Xu, Manṣūr Ma Xuezhi, Muḥammad Yūsuf, and Ma Qirong
• 6. Origins Reveal: The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya
• 7. Origins Move: Diasporas of the Hijaz, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Northwest China
• 8. Origins Distort: Myths of the Han Kitab
• 9. Origin Without Essence: Ascription and Transmission in Islamic China
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Books Published by Ma Lianyuan
• Notes
• Selected Primary Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index