Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.

Rian Thum, in his book Islamic China: An Asian History (Harvard UP, 2025), 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 in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is 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.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Islamic China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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