Rian Thum Islamic China review, recensie en informatie boek over de geschiedenis van de Islam in China. Op 25 november 2025 verschijnt bij Harvard University Press het boek van Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer in East Asian History aan de University of Manchester, over de geschiedenis van de Islam in China. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.
Rian Thum Islamic China review en recensie
- “Beautifully written and on the cutting edge of scholarship, Islamic China is the rare book that is perfect for both those new to the subject and those deeply immersed in it.” (Valerie Hansen, author of The Year 1000: When Globalization Began)
Islamic China
An Asian History
- Auteur: Rian Thum
- Soort boek: Chinese geschiedenis, Islamitische geschiedenis
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Harvard University Press
- Verschijnt: 25 november 2025
- Omvang: 304 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Flaptekst boek over de geschiedenis van de islam in China
A deeply learned reassessment of the history of Chinese Muslims, who since the fourteenth century have been subject to a constant program of minoritization.
For 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.
Rian Thum 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.
