Alexander Stewart spent a year among the Islamic community of Xining, associating himself closely with members of two groups, whom he collectively calls “revivalists.” These include the followers of the Salafiyya movement, which has been present in China since the 1930s and has grown exponentially during the reform era. Inspired by ideas emanating mainly from Saudi Arabia, it encourages adherents to self-study and return to the literal reading of the Qur'an and Hadith. The other studied group were members of Tabligh Jama'at, a revivalist non-sectarian movement of South Asian origin that arrived in China in the mid-1980s. Tabligh Jama'at's supporters study the Islamic creed in small private assemblies, later spreading their understanding of the religion during preaching trips. The presence and activities of the Tablighis in China have hitherto been little studied by non-Chinese scholars, and Stewart's book helps bring this relatively new trend to the attention of those interested in the dynamics of Chinese Islam (according to my knowledge, Leila Chebbi may be the only Western scholar to previously study and describe Jama'at's influence in China at some length. Stewart seems unaware of this part of her research).

The result of Stewart's time in the “great Northwest” is an important glimpse into the religious and intellectual trends currently reshaping the Chinese Muslim community. However, his research methods may be deemed controversial and arouse ethical concerns, specifically his rather unconvincing conversion to Islam at a Salafi mosque in Xining. Perceived as a Muslim, he was given unprecedented access to Salafi and Tablighi circles (he prayed and studied with members of both movements and participated in a Tablighi preaching tour in rural Qinghai), but this may cause many of his informants unease and hinder any possible future extensions of his work on Chinese Islam. His status as a white American convert certainly helped him gain the trust of numerous Muslims (with the exception of the leading imam of Xining's largest mosque), most of whom were born into one of the Muslim ethnic minorities recognized by the PRC government (the majority of them Hui). These ethnic Muslims used to take their Islamic creed for granted as something that was inherited from one's ancestors, but seldom studied and practiced seriously. For many of them, a gradual process of rediscovering Islam, took them from “ethnic” to “real” Muslims, hence the author labelling them “reaffirmed Muslims.” Through interviews with many of them (as well as some converts) and by confronting their voices with critical opinions held by people outside their circles (Gedimu traditionalists, Sufis, and the state-aligned and locally dominant Yihewani), Stewart manages to make fresh and interesting observations on the many and entangled nuances of being both pious Muslim and patriotic Chinese in the contemporary PRC. By contemplating his interviewees’ personal efforts at self-cultivation in the atheist and materialistic environment of modern China, Stewart discovered that Muslim revivalists “want to leave particularistic ethnic religiosity behind them and rediscover more forward-looking independent, and universal religious subjectivities” (p. 197) and that in piously practicing their “variously defined revitalizations of Islam” (p. 193) they “tend to emphasize membership in the moral community of the transnational ummah more than their citizenship in the Chinese state.” This, however, does not mean that that their transnational Islamic identity is necessarily formed in opposition to the state (p. 199). Holding Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia or Malaysia – but also the United States and Japan (which they believe to have large and growing populations of Muslim converts) – in high esteem, the Chinese “revivalists” associate themselves discursively with Muslims in those countries and so transcend ethnic and national differences “to lay claim to a greater degree of modernity than non-Muslim Chinese” (pp. 179–80). This appears to be valid not only today – and not only for contemporary Chinese Muslim revivalists – but seems to have been a generally important component of the modern Chinese Muslim identity, at least since the Republican era and the modernist efforts of Muslim Chinese scholars (like those associated with Chengda shifan school of Beijing) who actively participated in the creation of modern Sino-Muslim identity as equally “Islamic” and “Chinese.” In this sense Stewart's observation of contemporary Northwestern “revivalists” demonstrates that, despite their apparent novelty, Salafiyya and Tabligh Jama'at represent the latest manifestations of the historically deep-rooted Chinese Muslim quest for a comfortable space, within both the idealized global Ummah and the Chinese nation-state.

Stewart's book is an important addition to the rapidly growing field of Sino-Muslim studies and should also be of interest to scholars of Islam, contemporary Chinese society and religion. It might also be useful as teaching material, not only because of the wealth of information it includes and the quality of its argument, but also as a starting point for discussion on the ethical considerations of studying religious communities.