Asian Review of Books Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Mar 5, 2026
Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester who writes on Uyghur and Chinese Muslim history. He explores Persian and Arabic sources that reshape understandings of Chinese Islam. Short takes on the Hui and Uyghur communities, transregional travel and book networks, and how Muslim education and languages evolved across the Ming to Republican eras.
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Chinese Muslims Are Ordinary And Connected
- Chinese Islam has been misrepresented as an exotic synthesis dominated by Confucian compromise.
- Rian Thum shows Chinese Muslims were deeply connected to broader Muslim worlds and literatures in Arabic and Persian, not isolated syncretists.
Two Major Muslim Populations With Different Geographies
- China’s Muslim population (~25 million) is diverse and spread across many provinces with Uyghurs and Hui dominant.
- Uyghurs are regionally concentrated in Xinjiang; Hui are dispersed, often culturally Chinese and defined as an ethnicity by religion in the 20th century.
Textual Shifts Mark A Historical Break
- The book period (late Ming to early Republican) maps to a shift in textual culture and Islamic thought.
- Thum stops around the early 20th century because print change and Islamic modernism shifted practices from 'adding books' to 'removing texts' from the canon.
