A Brief History of Sino-Muslim Studies

Muslims have lived in the Chinese culture area since the seventh or eighth century – the mid-Tang dynasty – and have acculturated, as all immigrants do, in order to live comfortably in what began as an alien environment. Over a millennium, through ordinary social processes, including intermarriage with local women, they ceased being utterly foreign and became local but different, Sinophone but not entirely Chinese. Though they spoke the Chinese of their home districts, many of them nonetheless retained female endogamy (males could marry non-Muslim women who converted to Islam), pork avoidance, unfamiliar rituals, mosque-centred community solidarity, and outlandish vocabulary, rendering them unconventional, somewhat distant, sometimes defensively hostile towards their non-Muslim neighbours, who saw them as ‘familiar strangers’.

Some of the Chinese Muslim elites also wrote about themselves, especially as their differences from their neighbours grew less obvious. Conservatives among them worried lest their acculturation should reach assimilation, at which point they would no longer be Muslims in any meaningful religious sense. Intellectual leaders among them worried that they would seem alien and antagonistic to the culture of their homeland and the orthodoxy mandated by their Qing overlords. So they wrote treatises, apologia, and genealogies – familial, intellectual, spiritual – to keep their co-religionists faithful to some version of Islamic tradition. Oral traditions evolved explaining how Muslims came to live in China, extolling their Arabian heritage as civilised, cultured and valuable. Their internal narratives had Chinese emperors eagerly seeking knowledge of Islam, welcoming high-ranking Muslim dignitaries as honoured guests, and even converting. However unlikely these stories may seem, in the twenty-first century they continue to function as justifications for both the Muslim presence in China and their desire to remain different. From Mongol-period inscriptions to the seventeenth-century Genealogy of the Transmission and Lineage of Classical Learning (Jingxue xichuan pu), from early twentieth-century arguments about whether Sino-Muslims constitute a ‘nation’, or an ‘ethnic group’ or a ‘religious group’ (see Cieciura, Chapter 5, this volume) to contemporary Internet debates (see Chérif-Chebbi, Chapter 8, this volume), Sino-Muslim insiders have described and argued in Chinese about their origins, their history and their collective nature.

Outsiders have written about them as well. Some non-Muslim Chinese penned scurrilous anti-Muslim prose and poetry, while others praised the Muslims’ courage, scientific skill and business acumen.