Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025)

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**SPEAKER_1** (1:22)
Welcome to the New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:27)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books Podcast and in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we're going to review fiction and nonfiction authors written in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims aren't really Chinese or perhaps not really Muslim. Rian Thum, in his book, Islamic China and Asian History, strives to make Chinese Muslims ordinary, placing them in both Chinese and global history by following pilgrims, merchants, and others across the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras. Rian is Senior Lecturer of History at the University of Manchester, a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation. He is also the author of the Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association, and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. So, Rian, thanks so much for coming on the Asian Review of Books podcast today. You know, so why did you want to write Islamic China? You know, what's missing in how people talk about Islam in China?

**Rian Thum** (2:39)
Hi, thanks, Nick. It's really great to be talking with you.
There were a bunch of reasons that drew me to writing this book. In the most basic, practical sense, it started when I was doing research on connections between the two major Muslim-majority ethnic groups in China, the Uyghurs and the Hui, and my earlier book was pretty much exclusively about Uyghur history and culture. And I was curious about how other majority Muslim ethnic groups in China, how their religious practices connected with the Uyghurs. And as I pursued that, I was drawn more into the study of the Hui, the mostly Chinese-speaking Muslims of China. And as I started to explore that, I was following a trail of primary sources from the Uyghur end of things, and simultaneously reading the scholarly literature on it, and noticed that there were a large number of Persian and Arabic texts that were key to answering the questions I was working on, that weren't really talked about in the secondary literature. And this just got me curious about how much Persian and Arabic literature were Chinese, people who had Chinese as their first language and were Muslims, how much were they reading? And it turned out there's quite a lot. So it started to look to me like there was just a shortage, a pretty dire shortage of research on this part of the Chinese Muslim experience. And that causes an overemphasis on the texts written in Chinese. And that has a knock-on effect that has caused people outside of these Muslim communities, and indeed inside them in China as well, to start to view Chinese Islams as having an essence of a kind of compromise, that the poster child for Islam in China is an Islam that incorporates a heavy dose of Confucian philosophy and looks very, very strange in comparison to Islams of the Middle East or South Asia or Central Asia. The more poking around I did, the more implausible that understanding of Islam in China was. Eventually, I started to develop the opinion that what we were looking at in a lot of the secondary literature, especially overviews, was a somewhat distorted view of Muslims in China that portrays them as exceptional, exotic outliers in the history of Islam and Muslim communities around the world. When in fact, Muslims in China have always been very closely tied to developments in the rest of the Muslim majority world and have been very literate in other Muslim discourses and very engaged, both in the non-Muslim-dominated society they live in, in China, and in Muslim majority discourses. That's a long answer, but that's what I was trying to do. I frame it in the book as making the Muslims of China or talking about Muslims of China in the way they understand themselves, which is as ordinary people, an ordinary part of the Chinese cultural landscape. Everyone thinks that their culture that they grew up in, for them, it's not a surprise, it's not extraordinary, it's their normal. And I wanted to re-examine the history of Muslims in China from that perspective.