000			02230nam a22001937a 4500
003			OSt
005			20260309145642.0
008			260309b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780674976801
040			_ckul
082			_a297.0951 THU/I
084			_2Colon Classification
100			_aThum, Rian _911470
245			_aIslamic China : An Asian History
260			_bHarvard University Press , _c2025
300			_a294p.
520			_aFor more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland―as butchers, merchants, and farmers; diplomats, scholar-officials, and royal astronomers. Yet the Muslims of China have often been understood as inherently foreign, incompatible with Chinese culture. In this reappraisal, Rian Thum recaptures the ordinariness of Chinese Muslims. In doing so, he suggests that these communities, whose classification has so often been seen as problematic, can teach us about the ways social categories are made and maintained in the first place. Firmly rooted in Chinese and long-neglected Perso-Arabic sources, Islamic China traces the interlinked histories of twenty Chinese Muslims, some famous and some obscure, spread across multiple ethnicities, sects, and centuries. Their stories―emphasizing the diversity of Chinese Muslim communities and their continuous exchanges with other groups both within and beyond China―cut through the flattening narratives that have obscured China’s Muslim heritage. Taken together, the experiences chronicled here offer a fresh view of Islamic China, stretching across Central, Southeast, and South Asia―and of China itself. While focused on the Ming, Qing, and early Republican eras, Thum also harkens back to earlier centuries and traces the inheritances of this history to the present. Islamic China makes the compelling argument that the abstractions brought to bear on the past have practical implications in today’s People’s Republic of China, where the state enforces an oppressive regime of differentiation and control aimed broadly at Muslims and is routinely exposed for atrocities committed against particular subgroups.
942			_2ddc _cBK
999			_c757392 _d757392