Islamic China: An Asian History

"Yes, this book is also about how there can sometimes be more and sometimes much less space for different forms of cultural expression in the physical territory that we now think of as China. Rian Thum is a beautiful writer, as he showed in his first book, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History , a wonderful work on Xinjiang. He’s at heart a historian who was tempted by archaeology, and he really likes to go deep. In this book, what he claims is that there’s a very long history of both China being part of the story of global Islam, and Islam being part of the story of China. He finds it curious that both Buddhism and Islam started having a presence within China around the same time, in each case due to people moving, texts moving and ideas moving across borders. And yet, now many think about Buddhism, which began in India , as a part of Chinese culture, whereas Islam keeps being seen, at least at times, as alien. If we think of the Hui who are both Chinese and Muslim, whether or not that becomes something that people think of as a problem is partly political and, like so many things about China, including where exactly its borders are, subject to change. This is not just a book for scholars; Thum enlivens it with storytelling about individuals and also about objects, about the circulation of books from different places and different sets of maps. He tracks the way that books flowed in and out of China, and how different languages could be used by the people involved in this. There are Persian texts that become important within China and are created by people who are also creating texts in Chinese. We often think in terms of assimilation or resistance to assimilation, rather than about fusions or hybrid elements from Islam that become so much a part of life within China that people don’t think of it as a problem. There are many examples in earlier periods in Chinese history when there was less of a sense of Islam being thought of as something that has not fully integrated into the life of China proper, when there was more of a sense that there could be people who follow different faiths or had ties to different parts of the world. He uses stories of some quite memorable figures, including some who write using different names at different times, so you might have a whole set of interactions with them but you don’t think about their Islamic -ness. Yes, he would be probably the one who people know about, this pivotal figure from Chinese history who is talked about as Chinese. I think what Thum’s book is partly about is, imagine not thinking of it as a curiosity that stands out when you learn that Zheng He was a Muslim. What has not penetrated our image of Asian history is the fact that land-based connections between the Indian subcontinent and East Asia were often via Muslims. I think other national histories have those blind spots, too."