Rian Thum’s Islamic China: An Asian History focuses on the Hui (Sinophone) Muslims who had constructed their communities around mosques across China by the sixteenth century. Their Islamic ancestors had migrated from various regions of Asia and brought a part of Han Chinese into the Islamic fold through intermarriage and conversion. The book mainly explores the intellectual history of Hui Muslims between 1640 and 1920 while paying attention to their interactions with the Muslim world outside China. Its aim is to challenge the essentialist assumption that Islam and China are inherently incompatible, rooted in a Middle East-centric understanding of Islam and a Han-centric view of China. In other words, the book attempts to remove a sense of anomaly regarding the existence of Muslims in China, which led to the Chinese government introducing the ethno-religious policy known as the sinicisation of Islam or de-Arabicisation.

Thum thus demonstrates the ordinariness of the Islamic cultures from West, Central, and South Asia in China and that of Chinese Islam in the Muslim world by making several points against previous studies. First, contrary to the beliefs of other scholars, Arabic and Persian texts were more ordinary in education for Hui Muslims before their educational reform movement emphasised the Chinese language in the twentieth century. The premodern Chinese-speaking Muslims’ ‘most common initial experience of learning to read for comprehension was in Persian, not Chinese or even Arabic’ (p. 56). The publication of Arabic and Persian texts by the Yunnan Hui scholar Ma Lianyuan 馬聯元 (d. 1903) to revive the educational system in Chinese-speaking Muslim society attests to this intellectual situation. In contrast, the Chinese-language Islamic classics presently known as Han Kitāb were not as ordinary for Hui Muslims as scholars have previously assessed. Most Sinophone Muslims could not understand this esoteric literature. Although written by Hui authors in classical Chinese using Arabic and Persian texts as a basis, it was decorated with terms and quotes from the classics of the dominant religions in China, such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

Second, Thum asserts that Hui Muslims had more exchanges with Muslims outside China during the Ming and Qing periods than scholars have believed. For example, many Arabic and Persian works were shared by Muslims in China, India, and Central Asia. These works included those written in the post-Mongol period when China is believed to have been almost completely isolated from the Muslim world. The Indian intellectual influence among Hui Muslims is especially noteworthy. For example, Hui scholars often mentioned the Indian formula īmān-i mujmal, which is used to profess belief in Islam. Suborders of the Mujaddidī Sufi lineage rose in Northwest China, and the Persian work Maktūbāt of the same order’s eponym Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1624) spread among the Hui Muslim factions after the nineteenth century.

Moreover, Thum problematises our attention to origins, which ‘lies at the heart of the outsider’s “surprise” at Chinese Muslims’ (p. 6), considering how identity ‘categories create origins, perhaps more even than origins lead to categories’ (p. 113). He therefore examines how Hui Muslims narrated their roots differently ‘to establish a place for themselves and their communities, to explain the categories they inhabited’ (p. 132). Specifically, he scrutinises Hui Muslims’ origin stories using multilingual sources, such as Lan Xu’s 藍煦 (d. after 1873) Chinese-language Islamic classic, Ma Xuezhi’s 馬學智 (d. 1933) Arabic hagiography of a branch of the Sufi lineage Jahriyya, Muḥammad Yūsuf’s (d. 1866) Persian hagiography of a suborder of Mujaddidiyya, and Ma Qirong’s 馬啟榮 Chinese work regarding the history of the arrival of Muslims in China (published around 1876–1877). Accordingly, Thum confirms that their origin stories reveal how these authors ‘understood their own communities in their own presents’ (p. 159). Additionally, he traces the histories of the continued inheritance of Mujaddidiyya in China, thereby illuminating that origin stories could be forgotten or transformed by reshaped communities. He also considers the Chinese Muslim diaspora’s origin stories, including those in which China is the origin, thereby stressing that ‘valuing Meccan or any other origin is a significant community choice’ (p. 179). Thum also refutes studies that regard Chinese-language Islamic classics as representing ‘an instance of syncretism of Chinese and Islamic thoughts’ or ‘the meeting of two civilizations’ with different origins (p. 191). Therefore, he objects to studies that project the anachronistic designation of Han Kitāb onto Chinese–Islamic literature and explain it as constituting a distinctive Sino-Muslim canon or genre independent of Arabic and Persian tradition.

Lastly, Thum discusses whether Islam has an essence without which something is un-Islamic or whether whatever people believe to be Islam is Islam. He argues in favour of the latter by encouraging readers to see ‘Islamic history’ as the ‘process of the spread and reproduction of self-ascription’ (p. 221) by self-described Muslims, including those in China who called themselves Hui and Islam qingzhen 清真, for such Muslims can then be understood as more than nominal or as unsurprising, without an obsession with essentialism.

These fresh arguments are welcome and deepen our understanding of Chinese Islam. The book is also valuable in providing a firm foundation for the future study of Hui Muslims. In particular, Thum demonstrates the importance of the Arabic and Persian traditions for Sinophone Muslims and the indispensability of sources in these languages for researchers to understand Islam in China. This makes a considerable contribution to the field. Nevertheless, some questions may be raised. First, to what extent can Thum’s argument about the target audience of Wang Daiyu 王岱輿 (active around the mid seventeenth century) be generalised? Thum contends that Wang Daiyu wrote his Chinese Islamic works not so much to enlighten his co-religionists as to convince non-Muslim Han people of the superiority of Islam over Chinese dominant thought. While this point is valid, as Tazaka Kōdō has shown,Footnote ¹ some Hui authors of Chinese Islamic literature, such as Ma Boliang 馬伯良 and Wu Zixian 伍子先, aimed to re-Islamise their co-religionists who were illiterate in Arabic and Persian and had lost their Islamic knowledge. Indeed, they seemingly used more simple Chinese than Wang Daiyu. Ma Boliang (in Jiaokuan jieyao 教款捷要 [Essentials of Islam]) and Wu Zixian (in Xiushen mengyin 修真蒙引 [An introductory guide to cultivating self]) mainly addressed exoteric issues, such as how to pray, whereas Wang Daiyu addressed many esoteric matters related to Sufism and neo-Confucianism. When discussing the ordinariness of the Chinese–Islamic works for Hui Muslims, the linguistic levels and topics of the same works should be taken into consideration.

Second, Thum highlights the erasure of Mujaddidiyya from the self-designation of the Chinese suborders that branched from Aḥmad Sirhindī’s Sufi lineage as a mark of their adaptation to China. However, what can be said about an exceptional case, namely, the Chinese–Islamic work Tianfang daocheng qijing qianshuo, the preface of which was written in Gansu in 1902? This translated work makes a show of the designation ‘Naqshbandiyya and Aḥmadiyya Mujaddidiyya '(naiheshibandingye yu aihaimodingye muzhandidingye 奈該實板頂葉與哎海黙頂葉穆展的頂葉) as the Khufiyya’s ‘ancestral master’s honorary title’,Footnote ² although its original Persian work Risāla fī bayan-i kayfiyya-yi ʿamal-i sulūk-i Naqshbandiyya only says ‘ṭarīqa ʿāliyya Naqshbandiyya Aḥmadiyya’ in the corresponding part.Footnote ³ Does the difference indicate any change in the Mujaddidiyya’s prestigious status among Hui society or Central Asia? This question may provide a clue to the more dynamic process of the Sufi lineage’s transmission from India to China.

Third, though one may agree that it is inappropriate to use the concept of syncretism to characterise Chinese-language Islamic classics, one may also wonder what these authors thought about their ‘revisions’ of the teachings from their Arabic and Persian sources to align with the cultures of China. For example, Liu Zhi 劉智 (d. post 1724) rejected the principle of collective obligation (farḍ kifāya) and the concept of the community of all Muslims sharing a common destiny in favour of filial duty (xiao 孝) when he translated the Islamic funeral rules from Sharḥ al-Wiqāya.Footnote ⁴ One possibility is that Liu Zhi ignored the doctrine of collective obligation as a ‘non-essential’ element of Islam. However, another possibility is that he secretly realised that he had made a serious concession to Confucianism while ostensibly insisting on his faithful translation of Arabic and Persian classics. What was his true emic view? Certainly, it has not yet been established that whatever Hui Muslims have declared to be Islam is Islam because they believe it to be so.