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Podcast Host
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Ryan Thumb
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Nicholas Gordon
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 interview fiction and nonfiction authors working 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. Ryan Thumb, 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. Ryan 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 Sue Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. So Ryan, thanks so much for coming on the Asian Review Books podcast today. You know, so, so why did you want to write Islamic China? You know, what's missing in how people talk about Islam in China? Hi.
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Ryan Thumb
Thanks Nick. It's, it's really great to be talking with you. There were a bunch of reasons that that drew me to 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 and the Hui. And my earlier book was pretty much exclusively about Uyghur history and culture and I was curious about how you know other other majority Muslim ethnic groups in China, how their religious practices connected with the Uyghurs. And as I pursued that I I was drawn more into the study of of the of the Hui, the the China mostly Chinese speaking Muslims of 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, you know, how, how much Persian and Arabic literature were Chinese, you know, people who had Chinese as their first language and were Muslims, how much were they reading? And it turned out there was, 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 a overemphasis on the, the texts written in, 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, of a kind of compromise that the sort of 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. And the more poking around I did, the more implausible that that understanding of Islam in China was. And 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, is sort of exotic outliers in, in the history of, 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 Muslim majority places discourses. So that it's a long, a long answer, but that, that's, that's what I was trying to do. And I frame it in the book as, as making the Muslims of China or talking about Muslims of China in the way they understand themselves, which is as ordinary, ordinary people, an ordinary part of the Chinese cultural landscape. Everyone thinks that they, that their culture that they grew up in, for them it's not a surprise, it's not, it's not extraordinary. It's, it's their normal. And I wanted to re. Examine the history of Muslims in China from that perspective.
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Nicholas Gordon
And so when, when we're talking about kind of, you know, these, these, these Chinese Muslim populations, I mean like, you know, where are they based, what are they Doing what connections do they have with the world outside the of China with can maybe the broader kind of Muslim community, what actually they have with the broader Chinese community. Like, like, how do you, like, what's the best way to think about this population of people?
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Ryan Thumb
It's a challenge to summarize this because it's changed so much in the last hundred years and the book is mostly about things from say 1920 and earlier. But I usually summarize this in reference to the present because that's what people are most familiar with. And so in the present in China there are maybe 25 million Muslims in China and they are to be found in every province of, of China. They are mostly accounted for by two large ethnic groups, the Uyghurs and the Hui. But there are another, another, I'm forgetting the number, another 10 or so or eight or 10 or so other ethnic groups that are Muslim majority. So your, your main ethnic groups are the Uyghurs and the Hu and they, they have very different of geographic and historical outlines. So the Uyghurs are a part of China today because their land was conquered by China based states several times over the last two millennia, but really only in a long term way since the middle of the 18th century. And they are concentrated almost exclusively in the region that China calls Xinjiang or the New Territories, which Uyghurs tend to refer to as Eastern Turkestan. So there, this, this sort of half of the Muslim population in China are incorporated by China's expansion. China sort of comes to them. The other group is the Hui. They can be found in that Xinjiang region, but they are found almost everywhere in China, both in cities as a, as a kind of smattering of, of people every, in every major city and in some particular rural areas where they have majorities in certain counties and prefectures. And they, their presence in China is the product of, you know, 1200, 1300 years of Muslims arriving in China, people being converted to Islam. Most of them are the descendants along of a long line of Muslims born in China. But all of them would, would eventually, if they could trace their roots, would trace it back to some ancestor converting or probably in a minority of cases, some ancestor who arrived from, arrived from outside of China. There are two really interesting things about, you know, summarizing, you know, why are the Hui there? Which is a bit of a strange question. No one asks why are, why are there Buddhists in China? But this goes back to the sense that people are surprised that there are Muslims in China. One is that the hui have 150 years ago were not considered an ethnic group. They called themselves people of the Hui teaching. So they considered themselves just people who had adhered to a different philosophy or a special branch of philosophy or religion, if you want to call it that. It was only in the course of the 20th century that Chinese governments in conversation with Hui communities decided that if you are culturally Chinese, you speak some version of Chinese and you have a whole bunch of other cultural features that look like the, the Han majority in China. If you are a Han person who is Muslim, that makes you a different ethnicity. So it's a very unusual globally sort of minority case of how ethnicity works, that it is religion that is the, the religion is the sort of defining characteristic that makes you a different ethnic group. The other interesting thing is that the Hui and also Uyghurs have also left China. Large numbers have left China in the course of their mercantile activity or in wars where they become exiles and established other communities outside of China. So for example, there's a Muslim Chinese or Hui community that's about a hundred and one hundred, one hundred and twenty years old in Chiang Mai in Thailand. There's another one in Saudi Arabia. So it's a complex terrain. But to sum it up, I would say there are 25 million Muslims in China. Muslims have been in China for, born and raised in China for over a thousand years and they span multiple ethnic groups.
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Nicholas Gordon
You know, your, your book covers mostly covers kind of the Ming, the Qing and the Republican eras. I mean, why did you want to focus on that part of China's history in particular? And did, did the, did China's understanding of Islam and Chinese Muslims change kind of over, over those centuries?
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Ryan Thumb
Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. The main reason that I chose the late Ming as a starting point is it, it is the first period in which we have books written by Chinese Muslims, Chinese speaking Muslims about Islam and about themselves that are, that are surviving and accessible. I expect that there are a lot of, or maybe a handful of manuscript sources that are older than that that have not surfaced yet that might be lying in wait in some inaccessible state archives in, in China, but we don't have access to those yet. So it's that late Ming, there's a burst of, of writing and, and printing of books that makes the literary world of, of Chinese Muslims and their own ideas about themselves and how they fit into China and what Islam is for them makes it suddenly visible. So that's, that's where I started and it's really just a choice based on what sources are available, although the fact that those sources came, became available is itself a historical turning point. So it also makes a certain amount of historical sense to, to start there. The end point of, of the early 19th century, the early Republican, sorry, early 20th century, early Republican period, is, is aimed at a few things. One is that the way books are made and, and dispersed is, is changing at that point. That's when movable type comes in. And also there are changes in the way people think about Islam and think about knowledge that brought the story too far out of, of what some of my main points were. And so those changes include Islamic modernism and textual literalism. And I like to sum it up with the idea that up until the turn of the 20th century, nearly all changes to how people thought about Islam and what they thought you should read were about adding books to the canon. And it's only at that time where you start to get really substantial movements that are starting to say no, actually much of what we've been thinking and saying needs to be eliminated. You get groups who want to remove books, remove wisdom from the canon and say that it's, you know, it's against the principles of Islam. So I sort of took that moment of the change in book production which brings with it different ways of knowing and this change in ideas about Islam, which is a pretty, pretty stark break as the later end of the period. Of course, as you know, having read the book, um, throughout the book I, I give little vignettes and examples of how these Ming Ching and early Republican phenomena that I'm describing survive in the present and continue to shape people's lives and communities.
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Nicholas Gordon
So I, I want to talk about maybe one of the people you focus on kind of in your book, which is Ma Y and Yuan. You know, how, who was he and why is he important to this story about Chinese Islam?
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Ryan Thumb
So Ma Lian Yuan was a Muslim scholar who was born in the 19th century in Yunnan in the, in the southwest, which is a part of China that has a lot of Chinese speaking Muslims, including a lot of rural areas where the, where Muslims are the majority. And he's important for, for several reasons. One of them, I guess as from a researcher's perspective, he's, he's super important because he puts a lot of books into print that were previously circulating only in manuscript. This is important because manuscripts don't survive very well. They are also more tightly regulated by the Chinese state. They're seen as generally more sensitive. And so a lot of books that were in wide circulation are not very accessible to us. And when Ma liangyuan in the 1890s goes about publishing them in woodblock form, he published a little over 20 different books that were all, not, not necessarily his compositions, things that were used as teaching materials for Muslims. It's sudden all these books suddenly come into, into clear, clear view. And through them we get a sense of what one man's idea of the canon of important texts was, and we get a sense of what was being taught to students because his main goal in life seems to have been restoring the system of Islamic schools and education that existed in his youth and had been interrupted by a rebellion in the late 19th, late 19th century. So there are a few things that we can glean from this. One is that the education system in Yunnan and in many other parts of China for Muslims was dominated by Persian first and then Arabic and then Chinese last. So in, in Ma Lianyuan's education system, students may have been learning a little bit of some basic Chinese characters, but their first real education in how to read was not in their native language of Chinese, but rather in Persian. Another thing that's interesting about Ma Lianyuan is that he integrates two types of literature that have often been treated as separate in the study of Muslims in China. One of them is the body of quite abstruse philosophical literature in Chinese, which is explaining Islam in Confucian terms and indeed probably in some cases trying to improve Confucian philosophy by introducing bits of knowledge and wisdom from Islam. And then those are texts written in China in the 1600s and 1700s. Those have often been seen as something very separate from the body of Persian and Arabic texts, most of which are borrowed from Central Asia and as my book shows, a lot of them from India. And Malianyan was engaging in both of those. And in fact, when he wanted to introduce his students to this Confucian tinged philosophy written in Chinese, he often did so through Arabic, translating those works into Arabic and even making explanatory commentaries in Arabic. So he's a figure that makes clear to us how various traditions among Chinese Muslims were interconnected.
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Ryan Thumb
Your planet is now marked for death.
- [21:30]
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Ryan Thumb
We will protect you as a family.
- [21:36]
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Ryan Thumb
That is fantastic.
- [21:43]
Marvel Studios Promoter
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Ryan Thumb
What time is it, Ben? It's cl.
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Nicholas Gordon
So, I mean, actually this is a segment of my question which is, you know, when you're looking at these kind of these, these Chinese Muslim works, I mean, are they in Arabic, are they in Chinese, are they in other kind of, you know, Persian or Turkic languages? I mean, what are, you know, when, when people are, are writing works about Islam in China? I mean, what, what language are they using? And maybe just quite broadly, like what, what are some other things, like other reference works that they're referring to in addition to, to Islamic texts.
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Ryan Thumb
They. So I, I did a little survey of books pre, say pre1915 books that were available in a single valley in, in Yunnan in mosque collections and in the hands of antique dealers. And the sample size is somewhat small, so you should take this with a grain of salt. But in the mosque there, there was, there's a particular mosque that is unusual for having a library that was not fully disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and was reconstituted and, and is traceable back to the late 19th century as being a continuously used library through all the owner stamps on the books. So it's a real treasure to have this selection of books in that collection. The vast majority of books are written in either Persian or Arabic. Among the antique dealers, which I think probably represent more of what sort of ordinary people were reading. And I, I can say ordinary people were reading because the expectation was that all or most children would go to an elementary school and if they were Muslims, they, the elementary school they would go to would be attached to the mosque and would teach, give it Islamic education. And all or most of. No, sorry, not all or most. I should say about half of the books in in those antique dealer collections which are just accumulations, you know, antique dealers buy whatever is old that they can sell. About half of them were in Chinese and the other half were in Persian, Arabic or a combination of the two. So these are the dominant languages. There's a rare case of a Chagatai text in, in Qinghai. Chagatai is a Turkic Turkic language that is the ancestor of the Uyghur language. But predominantly it's, it's Persian and Arabic and then Chinese texts as well. That changes in the 20th century when you get more efforts at promoting literacy in Chinese across China, including the development of Baihua or vernacular Chinese. Because as, as you and many listeners will know, before the 20th century, written Chinese was very divorced from spoken Chinese. Almost like having to learn another language to learn how to read it. As, as literacy improves in China in general, in, in the Chinese language, you start to see more Islamic texts being pre produced it produced in Chinese. But even those, those very early texts written in Chinese in the 1600s and 1700s, when they cite their own sources and what they're reading, they are almost entirely Persian and Arabic sources. Things written from the 11th century through the 16th century, mostly in South Asia, Iran and, and Central Asia.
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Nicholas Gordon
So you also kind of talk about the, the, the diaspora in your book. I mean particularly in places like, like Southeast Asia. I mean what, what kind of influence did these groups have on the development of kind of Chinese Islam?
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Ryan Thumb
There have been a lot of, a lot of diaspora groups over the last millennium and their history is pretty poorly documented for the most part. I mean, I should say writing, academic writing about Chinese Muslims is, is pretty sparse in, in general. So there's, there's almost no topic where you can say this is a, this is an over researched, over researched topic. There have been studies of, of these diaspora communities sort of one by one. Here's a, you know, a dissertation on this group or a article on, on that group. But there a good number of the diasporas we, we still know nothing about or, or have disappeared disappeared from history. But where we can see them we see that they, you know, these are groups founded by people who leave China, set up communities somewhere else. They do have influence back on the Muslims in China. So Ma Lianyuan very interestingly, for example, publishes books in India when he's there, which he says explicitly are being published in India so that he can send them back for the benefit of, of his students in, in Yunnan. The, the community in Northern Thailand is from the sort of Ma Lianyuan School of Education and they have their own library of books which has a lot of Ma Liangyuan's works and the works he encouraged people to read. And you can find copies of those books produced in Thailand back in Yunnan today. This suggests that it's quite likely that some of those now long gone diasporas, because some of those diaspora communities over the last millennium have sort of just merged into the, the, the local cultures that where they settled, those may also have had some of, some of that influence. And we get in the historical documents, we get really fascinating stories of Muslims who went and settled outside of, of China. Now I've so far been restricting myself to the diaspora communities in the sense of people who settle down and with no intention of returning to China. But there are also probably more importantly for the, the history of changes in Islamic practice and thought in China and identity. Really more importantly are probably the Muslims who left China with the intent of coming back. So they would go go for example to Yemen and study with a master there for several years and then come back with new books, new rituals that would then lead to the establishment of a new community with a new name that becomes distinct enough to battle other communities either in words or sometimes it with weapons. So this kind of coming and going had had an enormous effect on the, the transformations in, in Muslim communities over the last last several hundred years. And one of the reasons that that could happen and could happen so frequently is precisely because the languages of education and scholarship that Muslims Chinese speaking Muslims were using, Persian and Arabic are the languages being used. You know, Persian is a lingua franca in Central Asia in Northern India, in addition, you know, to being the main language in Iran. So if you have Persian and Arabic skills, you can go pretty much anywhere south and west of China and slip in pretty cleanly to the, to the scholarly circles there.
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Nicholas Gordon
So I, I, I do, I do want to kind of dive a little deeper in some of the other people you talk about in your book. But before I do that, you know, what actually was the research process for this book like? I mean, what did you have to do to dig up some of these sources?
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Ryan Thumb
Yeah, the challenge of writing about and seeking sources that, that haven't been used very much is that there's no real clear pathway to, to getting them A lot of the re. There were two, two main, two main approaches I took. One is pulling on a thread. So for example, in Yarkand, in, in the Uyghur region, I found a book that claimed that this Sufi, this mystical Muslim teacher, Sufi teacher had established a kind of school and pilgrimage site in Yarkand and had sent followers out to other, to, to China to, in the interior of China and listed all the, all the towns where he had sent them and claimed that they had set up communities. And I was pretty surprised by this because this network was not really documented in, as existing in the interior of China. And so I just went to those towns and went to the tombs in those towns where those, those followers whose names were in this book from Yarkan sought out their, their graves. And at their graves, I was able to in a couple of cases, find books that were preserved by the associated mosques and, and schools. So following the thread is, is one way, but probably the, the more common thing was I, I just, I just traveled around China going to mosques and looking for antique dealers and asking to see, you know, what books, what books they had. So a lot of historical research is done by looking at official archives, you know, state archives or collections in universities, things like that. But that really is, is not feasible in China for this topic because the state sees a lot of these sources as, as sensitive and they, the sources are not cataloged well when they do appear in archives because there just aren't that many people who can read and process the, an Arabic or Persian manuscript. So, yeah, it just became necessary to kind of find the books in, in the Wild. And then there was some more thread following, for example, to document the diaspora in Thailand. I wish I could have done that for more communities. I mean, there's a fascinating set of communities in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, to a lesser extent Uzbekistan that I just didn't have time to chase down. But yeah, it was a lot of book hunting, which is if you, if anyone reads a book, you'll, you'll get a sense that that's something I really, really enjoy doing.
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Nicholas Gordon
So before we, before we wrap up, I mean, we talk a lot about, about Molly and Run. But you know, you profile, you have other people in your book too. I mean, are there any people that you kind of uncovered in your research and kind of read about, you know, read their writings that still kind of stick with you now that you've finished with the book? I mean, are there any other examples of people from the Ming Ching or Republican eras that, you know, you still think about after being done with the book?
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Ryan Thumb
Yeah, the book is. You can think of the book as a collection of about 20 biographies. I really wanted to enter this topic through individual stories. And the reason for that is that the categories that we use are, are, are problematic and highly, highly contested. So I didn't want to say, you know, people who are hui do this. Well, what does hui mean? It's changed a lot. I wanted to see it through the eyes of the historical, historical actors. And if you, if you look at any one person's story, it almost never fits the, the academically derived or socially derived categories that we tried to fit those people in. And a lot of what I'm interested in the book is figuring out what those categories have made invisible to us. So following these individuals lives cuts through that. Especially when you have a collection of 10, 20 people who are cutting across the categories in very different ways. So let's see who has stuck with me. I think one person who, who actually has been written about a lot that really sticks with me is an author called Wang Da Yu who lived in the late, late Ming period and was one of the first. He kind of sees himself as the first, although we know there were a few earlier people to write about Islam in Chinese and the, the things he has to do to communicate in Chinese. And he, his audience seems to be non, non Muslims for the most part. So how is, how do you explain Islam that you've learned through Persian and Arabic texts to Confucian literati, to Buddhists working in, in, in Chinese? And there are a bunch of obstacles to that that he gets very creative with. You know, how do you describe what a prophet is? There's no such thing as a prophet in any of the literary resources that you have in Chinese at that time. He calls the Prophet Muhammad the ultimate sage, which is a term used also for Confucius. How do you explain the history? How do you explain the obligations that Muslims have? And in the process of explaining these things, he to a certain extent kind of rewrites some of the basics of Islam. So even the five pillars of Islam, fasting, giving alms, professing to the unity of God, pilgrimage to Mecca, I'm not sure which one. I'm forgetting he writes them in very, very different, very different terms. So for example, professing the oneness of God becomes remembering your origins. So it's really fascinating to see somebody struggling with this and seeing themselves as struggling with it. He talks about himself. He says, probably I will be the opener of the field and the field of writing about Islam and in, to a, to a Confucian audience. And in fact he was after, after his work, there are several more people who start doing this kind of cross philosophical, cross philosophical labor. Other, other people whose stories I like. There's a, there's another, there's another guy, I'm forgetting his name at the moment, who in sometime in the 1600s set off to the pilgrimage for Mecca, got waylaid, taken prisoner in Tibet, then got freed supposedly by an Egyptian traveler and taken to India where according to this story, he, he was welcomed into the ruler's court. And everyone was astonished that he could discourse upon Islamic legal questions and philosophical questions in perfectly good Persian. And then the ruler, this would have been Mughal India. The ruler was, my guess is probably a sort of regional, you know, governor or something like that, asks him to stay and he says, no, I have to go on to Mecca, but if, you know, if I make it back, I'll stay. And then he does, he goes to Mecca and he comes back, supposedly establishes a school there, is getting letters from, back from China from his family and just creates a, creates a new life, marries someone in India and then disappears from, disappears from the historical record. And then we have a lot of stories of the people who, who came back from abroad. Those tend to be better covered in the, in the secondary literature, but, but not in all cases. And those are interesting because there, there develops a, a pattern of, of people thinking that anyone who has acquired knowledge from far away has a special authority. So if you go abroad and learn from a master abroad or even just somewhere within China but further west, you get a special authority that can turn you into a master and even the founder of a movement. Yeah, so those are some of the ones that stick with me.
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Nicholas Gordon
Well, I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Ryan Thumb, author of Islamic China and Asian History. Before Yandi Ryan, I have two final questions for you which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work. And what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [39:59]
Ryan Thumb
Well, yeah, you know, I have one other book which is called the Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, which is available on any bookselling site and most university libraries and various articles which, you know, you can find if you go to scholar.google.com and type in my name, you can find whatever articles I've written. And I also have written about kind of human rights issues and state policy, which has been quite repressive toward both Uyghurs and Hui and really connects to a lot of the historical issues in this, this current book which you can find in, in less academic venues with a, with a Google search. What's next? I, in terms of a book length project, I, I, I don't have anything in in mind. I, I kind of want to take a, a year to explore and contemplate and see, see what interests me and see where, you know, where my own thinking has changed in the last decade and what that means for my engagement with all the historical material that's out there. One thing I want to do is go back to doing some more work on Uyghur history. The amount of manuscript sources available in Uyghur is really enormous and, and not a ton has, has been written on that. So I, I want to go back and to my roots kind of and do, do do a bit of that. There are some projects, a lot of side projects from the current book that, you know, didn't make it into the book that I'll turn into, turn into articles, you know, analyses of various texts that are a little maybe too abstruse for a, for a book, but I think will be fun and valuable as articles. So kind of a little bit of housekeeping and exploring and yeah, we'll see where it goes next. This current book that just came out, I had no grand plans for that when I finished the first book. It was really the product of exploration and I like to have the historical material and sources drive my, drive my inquiries. So yeah, a lot of exploring in the, in the next year or two before I start to shape up a clear project.
- [42:39]
Nicholas Gordon
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asiareviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter at Book Reviews Asia. That's reviews plural. And you can find many more authors at the New books network and newbooksnowe.com we're on all my favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends, supports, everything those running in around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news on who's coming up on the show but before then, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [43:11]
Ryan Thumb
Thank you. It was a pleasure talking with you.