“The goal of this book”, writes Rian Thum in his introduction, “is to reach an understanding of Islamic Chinese history that makes the Muslims of China unsurprising, even ordinary.” The layman who has visited, say, Xi’an, might be surprised that this should be deemed necessary.
But there are apparently widely-held views that Chinese Muslims are not entirely Muslim in some way (Thum quotes an epigraph “Are they really Muslims?” from a 2002 book on Islam in China) or that Islam per se is in some way incompatible with being Chinese. Although Thum’s targets are mostly the academic expressions of such views rather than the way they appear in more general discussion, both seem at least slightly curious in light of the observed reality on the ground. Nevertheless, “There are good reasons to attend to the history of people who were at once Muslim and Chinese,” he goes on to write.
They receive scant attention in most general histories of China, as well as most general histories of Islam. In terms of relative numbers alone, this near absence is striking. Today there are more Muslims in China than in Syria, Malaysia, or Tunisia. This puts China well ahead of Russia and far behind India in terms of Muslim population, placing it among the nation-states with the largest Muslim minorities. The history of Islamic China is thus crucial to a full understanding of both Islam and China.
This is an academic text, much concerned with the current status of research and analysis and even the formal definition of “ordinary”.
The study of “the ordinary” has a long history, particularly in cultural anthropology, and yet definitions of the ordinary are scarce. This is likely because the concept’s close cousin, “the everyday,” has attracted careful attention from an illustrious array of thinkers across the second half of the twentieth century, to the extent that we can even read a history of theorization of the everyday. With good reason, scholars tend to treat “the ordinary” and “the everyday” as roughly interchangeable, allowing them to draw from the substantial scholarship of “the everyday.” There are, however, cases in which “the ordinary,” and especially “ordinary” as an adjective, can be different from the “everyday.”
The lay reader might be advised to overlook much of that and focus instead on the fascinating people that Thum writes about who, despite his search for the “ordinary”, seem anything but.
There is of course the obligatory mention of the Ming Dynasty Admiral Zheng He, but the core of the book is the 19th-century Yunnanese Muslim scholar Ma Lianyuan, who traced
his ancestry to a thirteenth-century “Sultan” of Bukhara, the great Central Asian center of Islamic learning. This king, a certain ‘Abdallah (or ‘Abd al Malik, according to another edition) ibn ‘Abd al-Jalīl, supposedly fled to China with five hundred men when his younger brother attempted to take the throne.The Mongol emperor of China employed him as an official and sent him to govern Yunnan. There, Ma says, he was given a new title, Sai Dian Chi. It is a title that is well known among Muslims in Yunnan today, where it serves as a metonym for the origin of Yunnanese Muslims in general.
Ma wrote extensive commentaries on Islam—he had a deep and abiding interest in reviving the quality of Islamic education in China following upheavals there in the latter part of the 19th century.
In his own day, Ma’s publications were probably the most numerous of Islamic books in circulation in northwestern Yunnan, home to one of China’s great concentrations of Muslims.
But Ma has a second persona: Nūr al-Ḥaqq ibn Sayyid Luqmān, a Muslim scholar who lived and published in what was then British India; Ma could write in Chinese, Arabic and Persian. He travelled to India and thence to Mecca by the Tea Road via Burma. That Ma was, and could be, both at once is the illustration of Thum’s larger point.
In his discussions of the various and numerous texts of this and other writers, Thum is meticulous in providing historical, religious, social and religious context, including such details that Ma’s books were printed in Chinese as woodblocks and in Arabic-script as lithographs, moveable type still not having had made much headway in either language.
Thum goes on to discuss the wider Asian Muslim networks of earlier centuries, Chinese Muslim diasporas in the Hijaz, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma and elsewhere, and the Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya sufi order’s presence in China. And it’s not that Islamic thought in China didn’t have its own characteristics:
The embrace of Confucian thinkers by some of China’s Muslim philosophers was indeed unprecedented in the history of Islamic thought. The conversations they initiated between Jamī and Mencius, Razī and Confucius, the Qur’an and The Doctrine of the Mean, comprise an important and fascinating chapter in the development of Islam, one worthy of continued study.
Although for the most part scholarly, Thum also includes long passages of on-the-ground reportage and interviews (among other things, he likes hunting down copies of these books).
Whether Thum succeeds in making the Muslims of China “ordinary”, I will leave to others. What he does do is imbue selected personages with personality, intellectual depth and fascination.