الصين الإسلامية

For more than a thousand years, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and Chinese Muslims born in China played important roles in their homeland, as butchers, merchants, farmers, diplomats, scholars, officials, and royal astronomers. However, Chinese Muslims are often viewed as inherently outsiders, incompatible with Chinese culture. In this new study, Ryan Thom brings back the spotlight on the daily lives of Chinese Muslims. He thus suggests that these societies, whose classification has long been considered problematic, can teach us how social categories are formulated and maintained in the first place. Firmly rooted in long-neglected Chinese and Persian-Arabic sources, “Islamic China” traces the tangled history of twenty Chinese Muslims, some famous and some obscure, distributed among multiple ethnicities and sects, and over the centuries. Their stories, which highlight the diversity of Chinese Muslim communities and their ongoing interactions with other groups inside and outside China, underscore simplistic narratives that obscure China's Islamic heritage. Taken together, the experiences documented here present a new vision of Islamic China, extending across Central, Southeastern, and Southern Asia, and of China itself. Although Thom's book focuses on the Ming and Qing dynasties and the beginnings of the Chinese Republic, it also reaches back centuries and traces the legacy of this history to the present day. The book makes a compelling case that abstract concepts applied to the past have practical implications in the People's Republic of China today, where the state enforces an oppressive regime of discrimination and control that targets Muslims in general, and is constantly exposed for atrocities committed against certain subgroups.