Hale Eroğlu’s Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China presents riveting accounts of the “unsung interpreters” who helped globalize the Muslim presence in China and, in turn, brought early twentieth-century Muslim reformist discourses back to Chinese-speaking Muslim communities (Green Reference Green2022: 319). The book powerfully illuminates how a generation of Chinese Muslim students and scholars traversed international waters to acquire knowledge and translated it into new vocabularies for articulating Muslim identity in a rapidly changing, non-Muslim majority society.

True to its transnational ambition, the book examines how Chinese Muslim intellectuals engaged deeply with a diverse set of reformist networks, including Kemalist modernism in Turkey, multiple contending strands of Islamic reform in Egypt, and the lesser-known Ahmadiyya publication circuits in London and Hong Kong. Through these networks, Chinese Muslims came into intellectual contact with key figures of modern Muslim thought such as Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad ‘Abduh, and the controversial and enigmatic Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Eroğlu shows how these young reformers armed themselves with new reformist thoughts to shape the fate of their communities, navigating between indifference and hostility from the Han-majority state.

The book’s first three chapters detail the birth pangs of a modern Chinese Muslim identity in a world increasingly defined by popular sovereignty and group self-determination. By analyzing rare Chinese-language engagements with the Kemalist revolution, Eroğlu convincingly argues that reformists in China made a strategic choice to ethnicize their identity. In a modernizing state that privileged ethnicity over religion, ethnicization offered a way to negotiate for group autonomy, even as it required the community to be reimagined through new taxonomies of inclusion and exclusion. This was a deliberate move, informed by the simultaneity of religiosity, geosocial marginality, and long-standing marginalization in the Chinese state.

One of the book’s most original contributions is its tracing of Ahmadiyya influence on Chinese Muslim reformism. Eroğlu documents the republication of Ahmadiyya writings in Chinese journals such as The China Muslim and Zhengdao and points to direct correspondence between Yuehua editors and the Lahori Ahmadiyya. The Beijing-based Searching Academy (zhuiqiu xuehui) is identified as an Ahmadiyya offshoot, and Chinese Muslim students even requested Ahmadiyya literature for local dissemination. Eroğlu’s multilingual command of sources, ranging from Chinese to Arabic and Turkish, establishes her as a leading expert in both Turkey-based Sinology and Anglophone scholarship on Islam in China.

At the heart of the book is a challenge to the conventional core-periphery model of the Muslim world. Eroğlu argues that imagined centers like Cairo were themselves fractured. Chinese Muslim students at Al-Azhar, therefore, were compelled to navigate this contentious marketplace of religious ideas, selectively absorbing what they encountered and translating their experiences for a home audience that expected coherence rather than heterodoxy from Islam’s symbolic heart. In their role as mediators, these students reveal how “the center” was less a fixed authority than an intellectual construct – produced through deliberate acts of both emphasis and omission. In keeping with this argument, Eroğlu shows that Chinese Muslim intellectuals were also well-versed in non-Sunni movements, including the Babakis, Qaramatis, and Isma‘ilis. The post-revolutionary Hui thinker Chen Keli even ventured to formulate a theory positing Islam as superior to both communism and capitalism as a sociopolitical system for organizing humanity.

The book also offers striking comparisons, such as between Turkish laicism and Maoist religious policy. In both contexts, the state separated religion from politics while actively managing religious life – shaping institutional frameworks and intervening when necessary (198). Given the book’s central focus on the ideological and discursive diversity of Chinese Muslim reformism, it is understandable that the more prominent state-making projects in the greater Northwest by Muslim militarists receive limited attention. Yet even here, Eroğlu opens a window onto new research terrain: for example, in her discussion of the Turkic Muslim powerbroker Isa Yusuf’s approach to Ma Bufang, whom he promoted as the rightful leader of all Muslims in China.

Eroğlu’s otherwise rigorous analysis wavers slightly in accepting the conventional binary between “Turbaned Muslims” in Xinjiang and “Han Muslims” in Gansu. Recent evidence challenges this distinction, pointing to Qing-era administrative language that ambiguously used the male Muslim headgear as a marker of geosocial difference. A more nuanced reading of the visual topography of the Dastar (دستار, the Persian term for turban, equivalent to the Arabic term Imaama) in Qinghai and Gansu will put both regions firmly within the realm of turbaned Muslim sartorial culture. That said, this oversight is symptomatic of a broader field-wide neglect, and it would be unfair to single out Eroğlu for what remains an open area of inquiry.

Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China makes a major contribution to the study of Islam in China and global Muslim intellectual history. Eroğlu challenges prevailing geographic hierarchies, documents overlooked transnational networks, and foregrounds the strategic agency of Chinese Muslim reformers. Her work fills critical gaps in our understanding of the modern Muslim world by demonstrating how global religious discourses are translated, negotiated, and reimagined in East Asian contexts.