Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. Rather than ossified entities with clear-cut parameters, regions such as East Asia are dynamic and ever-changing, being shaped through ‘dominant or hegemonic modes of spatial production during a period’, as Prasenjit Duara notes.Footnote ¹ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the period that the articles in this Forum primarily deal with—the dominant paradigm of social spatial production was imperialism, the territorial nation-state, and global capitalist modes of production and exchange that underpinned them.Footnote ² The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

Our focus on East Asia may appear somewhat odd at first glance: demographically, the cumulative Muslim population of the region barely exceeds 1 per cent of the total, with the bulk of that grouping largely centred in China’s northwest. Geo-religiously, East Asia is located beyond even the frontiers of both Marshall Hodgson’s formulations of ‘Nile to Oxus’ in his contested ‘Islamicate’ geographies, and Shahab Ahmed’s ‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’—that is to say, it is not even part of the discussions of the centre versus periphery or hierarchy that often concern the study of Islam in Asia.Footnote ³ It was never brought within the classical Islamic political fold for that matter, notwithstanding the ambitions of would-be-conquerors: in Ibn Kathīr’s al-Bidāya wal Nihāya (The Beginning and the End), the grim Umayyad governor al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf al-Thaqafī (661–714 ce) was reported to have openly aspired to subjugate al-Ṣīn (China): ‘had [he] lived, [the armies] would not have been deterred from that realm, and nothing would remain but to confront its king’.Footnote ⁴ Many centuries later, the ghazī ʾAmīr Timur (1320s–1405) was believed to have repeatedly plotted to restore the Mongol-Yuan ulus in China, with only his death pre-empting what might have been one of the last great Timurid invasions in Asia.Footnote ⁵

Yet despite its non-incorporation, East Asia was a site of intense and sustained cross-fertilization with Islamic networks, and was a constituent part, as Chiara Formichi puts it, of the ‘cohesive space of Islamized interaction’ that tangled the Asian continent together.Footnote ⁶ The great influxes and circulations of peoples, ideas, and goods from the lands of Islam (bilād al-islām), starting from the Abbasid-Tang ‘great game’ of the eighth century and reaching their apogee under the universal Mongol imperium of the thirteenth century, imparted a transformative legacy that can be discerned in everything from the urban planning of cities like Beijing and Kunming, the genealogies of families in Fujian and Korea, to the popular alcoholic beverages such as soju today.Footnote ⁷ In that sense, East Asia became a natural extension of the Islamic realms, and one that left visitors like the fourteenth-century Maghribī traveller Ibn Battuta, if not necessarily at ease with the surrounding ‘pagan’ Chinese population he encountered, then certainly pleased by the many Muslim enclaves that existed across the breadth of the Yuan-ruled realm.Footnote ⁸

More intriguingly, East Asia was, and remains, a geography that has raised many complicated and enduring questions about Muslimness. Well before the theological and legal implications of infidel rule came to haunt the minds of thirteenth-century Muslim jurists in the western Mediterranean, we find Muslims, primarily in tenth-century Turkestan, contending with such an unprecedented predicament under the Qara Khitai.Footnote ⁹ In China’s coastal and urban centres, Muslims who arrived in successive waves as soldiers, merchants, artisans, and bureaucrats forged diasporic commercial networks across the South China Seas and the Indian Ocean, and succeeded in bequeathing their religious-cultural identities to future generations over the course of a millennium. These ‘familiar strangers’ in the Chinese context, as Jonathan Lipman described them, were also engaged in the innovative reinterpretation of their tradition in response to local or global developments and trends.Footnote ¹⁰ Bin Chen’s article in this Forum, for example, looks at how Chinese Muslims in the early modern period debated the moon-sightings marking the commencement of Ramadan, as well as the efforts to standardize communal practices as part of a new ethno-national project.

These complexities, which embody real challenges to conventional notions of Muslimness and their ability to survive and thrive within non-Muslim contexts over a long period of time, may explain why some observers were so interested, and especially by the turn of the twentieth century, in discerning the exact status of China from an Islamic vantage point: was it dār al-ḥarb (abode of war)? Dār al-amān (abode of truce)? Or something altogether different?Footnote ¹¹ Some were tempted to go so far, as Mohammed Alsudairi and Ulrich Brandenburg’s article in this Forum explores, into reimagining the Muslim presence in China as a vanguard for East Asia’s conversion into the ‘new’ eastern flank of Islamdom—and at the very moment when the notion of a ‘Muslim world’ was coming into formation.Footnote ¹² These were not unidirectional imaginaries by any means, involving Chinese Muslims in a triangular process that brought Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia together in a process of collective narrative-building.Footnote ¹³ In Hale Eroğlu’s article in this Forum, we see another instance of this in the avid interest, and differing opinions, displayed by both non-Muslim and Muslim Chinese intellectuals in Turkish Republican modernization, a development that was itself suggestive of how different parts of Asia were increasingly being brought together in solidarity and contentious exchange over questions of sovereignty and national reform.Footnote ¹⁴

This brings us to an important dimension that all articles in this Forum have sought to emphasize: the significance of transnational flows and their disruptions in reshaping the relationalities of East Asia with Muslim societies in general. There is a tendency in scholarship to interpret (perhaps with a tinge of methodological nationalism) Muslim socio-religious lives, political investments, and external imaginings of them in self-enclosed national terms. Yet from the perspective of the long-durée, and traversing the pre-modern/modern divide, it is clear that the liminal status of Muslims in East Asia and their osmotic relationship with Muslim-majority societies have been highly sensitive to moments of opening and closure: moments shaped by the interventions of local authorities, and whose actions elsewhere reverberated beyond the region itself.Footnote ¹⁵ The Mongols certainly opened the doors wide for Muslims, who became an important and influential stratum within the empire.Footnote ¹⁶ When the Ming overthrew the Mongols, the doors closed, with many Muslims in southern China hiding inland or fleeing to Southeast Asia, possibly accelerating the Islamization of the latter.Footnote ¹⁷ Two centuries later, the Qing utilized Muslim bannermen to ‘pacify’ the Ming remnants in Guangdong, but also jumpstarted another wave of trader decampments to other places like Pattani in Thailand and Danang in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁸ The globe-spanning Naqshbandī Sufi networks, which placed the far-flung communities of China in contact with those of India and the Middle East, were heavily shaped by recurrent state violence and exile by the Qing (as well as later Republican and Maoist) authorities.Footnote ¹⁹ Since the 1980s, the post-Maoist Chinese state has leveraged its Muslim populations for diplomatic and economic engagement overseas, yet from 2014 onwards, coinciding with the launch of the ‘Sinicization of Islam’ campaign and three years later the ‘de-extremization’ campaign in Xinjiang, it has downplayed their visibility, and its restrictions have given rise to new diasporas (and exilic communities) that also must contend with state interventions and clampdowns abroad.Footnote ²⁰

This dynamic is not confined to China alone. The vibrancy of Muslim communities in the Korean Peninsula ebbed and flowed in conjunction with the broader trends of the region. In the fifteenth century, they faced severe suppression by the Joseon court and were pushed to extinction, but in the twentieth century they returned in full force as new religious leaders in post-war Seoul capitalized on Islam’s diplomatic utility to pursue an anti-communist agenda, amply examined in Janice Hyeju Jeong’s article in this Forum. Tatar Muslims, whose communal lives and networks are investigated in Ulrich Brandenburg’s article, were subjects who were discriminated against at home in Russia but took advantage of the Russian imperial project in Northeast Asia as refugees and merchants in the colonial space of Harbin. Brandenburg’s article highlights how Harbin, situated at the interstices of the Russian and Chinese empires, drew a host of Tatar, Chinese Muslim (Hui), and Japanese actors into an entangled and contested relationship, reflecting a modern instance of compelled ‘opening’ and its impact on the Muslim footprint in East Asia.

The afterlives of the Harbin diasporic Tatars as participants in the Japanese imperial project during the Second World War, and as key figures for Islamic institutions in Japan (and within its former imperial domains as in Korea), prompt us to rethink East Asia as a site of multidirectional Muslim mobilities at opportune moments. Indeed, even where the Islamic ‘touch’ has been the most faint, for example Japan—speculated in the medieval Perso-Arabic literature to be the mythical island of al-Wāq Wāq—the state nevertheless exploited the imagined power of pan-Islamic solidarity in service of its empire-building project in Asia, opening doors for Tatar, Chinese, and Turkic (Uyghur) Muslims. Japan’s Islam policy assumed the idea of China as a critical site of experimentation that could be transported to British and Dutch Southeast Asia.Footnote ²¹ Many decades later, paralleling developments in China, we see a tension between the capitalization and the suppression of Islam and Muslims within contemporary Korea and Japan: a desire to leverage Islamic visualities and communities for tourism and trade that sits uneasily with popular (and sometimes official) securitization fears and outright Islamophobia.Footnote ²²

These multidirectional mobilities, tying together the different ends of Asia, turned into overlapping conduits for harnessing political movements and visions across borders. Networks that had long facilitated religious and communal exchanges in the pre-modern era developed into politicized routes for modernist agendas, that is, revolutions and nationalist projects, and channels for exile when these endeavours failed. Turkistānī tekkes (Sufi lodges established in the fifteenth century along the eastern Mediterranean coastline) had long supported migrations and travels.Footnote ²³ During crises, they became sites of Turkistānī settlement, and in the early twentieth century, nodes for budding independence movements.Footnote ²⁴ These locations worked to strengthen transnational Muslim and ethnic identity and patchworks of diasporic sovereignties. Turkistānīs in the Tarsus region even fought for Turkish nationalists against the French occupation of the region after the First World War,Footnote ²⁵ and became involved in the short-lived East Turkestan Islamic Republic (1931–1935).Footnote ²⁶ Transnational nationalists in the diaspora who kept alternative political visions mobilized these channels from the other direction as well, as reflected in the activities of the Ottoman First World War veteran and Young Turk loyalist Tewfik el-Sherif Pasha in East Turkestan and his attempted courtship of the imperial Japanese authorities in support of staging rebellions in the region.Footnote ²⁷ Muslim networks transformed into multidirectional political channels, where competing and convergent ideas—about national and ethnic identity, state-building, and the geopolitical utility of Islam imagined as a unified entity and geography—were transmitted, appropriated, and rearticulated.

Such political and politicized imaginations about Islam and Muslims in East Asia—whether as peril or as promise—have circulated through a trans-regional and global nexus, with the assumption of Islam as a self-standing category. Yet, as opposed to being a region that is ‘civilizationally’ distinct (in the Huntingtonian sense) and separate from ‘Islam’, East Asia’s deep connections with Islam and Muslims dispel such essentializing binaries. Footnote ²⁸ As seen in the brief sketch presented above, and what the contributions of this Forum demonstrate, East Asia can be conceived of as an extension of wider Islamic Asia across time and space, a connection enabled by complex webs of mobility and the oscillations of the local between moments of opening and closure. It is a space that not only enables us to investigate ‘the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and Muslims’—as Hodgson defines the Islamicate—but to also question, per Ahmed, the ‘common paradigm of Islamic life and thought by which Muslims (and others) imagined, conceptualized, valorized, articulated and gave mutually-communicable meaning to their lives in terms of Islam’.Footnote ²⁹ The liminality of East Asia vis-à-vis Islamic Asia should not place the region in a silo. Instead, it is an opportunity for raising questions about the diversity of Islamic life and thought; imaginations of Islam that circulate across borders; and the making of Muslim networks. Our Forum is an invitation to take up that opportunity.