Liu Zhi (c1662-c1730), a well-known Muslim scholar writing in Chinese, published outstanding theological works, short treatises, and short poems on Islam. While traditional Arabic and Persian Islamic texts used unfamiliar concepts to explain Islam, Liu Zhi translated both text and concepts into Chinese culture. In this erudite volume, David Lee examines how Liu Zhi integrated the basic religious living of the monotheistic Hui Muslims into their pluralistic Chinese culture. Liu Zhi discussed the Prophet Muhammad in Confucian terms, and his work served as a bridge between peoples. This book is an in-depth study of Liu Zhi's contextualization of Islam within Chinese scholarship that argues his merging of the two never deviated from the basic principles of Islamic belief.

Can Christian identity and national identity be reconciled? For Christians in China, this question is particularly fraught. While Sinicization offers the indigenous church one path forward, it fails to provide a tenable solution for believers unwilling to submit their love of God under love of country. Dr. Jue Wang explores an alternative roadmap for Chinese Christian identity in the writings of Zhang Yijing. The editor of True Light, a Chinese Baptist publication, Zhang was also a Chinese patriot, Confucian, and life-long proponent of science and reason. Utilizing the lens of identity studies, Dr. Wang examines Zhang’s process of reconciling faith and culture in his quest to be both authentically Christian and authentically Chinese. This study offers a fascinating glimpse into the modern history of the Chinese church, while uncovering the significance of an often-overlooked Chinese Christian apologist. Zhang’s example offers encouragement and hope for believers around the world seeking to integrate social, cultural, and national identities under the lordship of Christ.

In China there are up to 25 million Muslims living in the country, representing over 1200 years of Chinese-Islamic relations. However, little is known about the historical and contemporary geopolitical relations between China and the Muslim world, or the situation for the diverse groups of Muslims living in China today. In this book, James Frankel studies the rich and dynamic history of Muslims in China from the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the present day. He shows that Muslims in China remain an internally diverse population separated geographically, ethnically, linguistically, economically, educationally, and along sectarian and kinship lines. But despite having its own local flavours and accents, Islam in China is recognisable as the same religious tradition practiced by approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide and Muslims in China are inextricably part of society, living alongside other minorities and amongst the great Han Chinese majority. Tracing 1200 years of history, this book shows that Muslim communities in China have undergone tremendous change, touched by the forces of Chinese history, the development of Islamic traditions outside China, and geopolitics. In highlighting the paradoxical situation in which Chinese Muslims have found themselves - living as both insiders and outsiders to Chinese society and state - the book examines why after so many centuries of habitation and naturalisation, Muslims in China are still stigmatized by their perceived alien origins. The book follows the 'yin and yang' of compatibility and difference and the connections and ruptures between two great civilisations.

Sufism has long constituted one of the most powerful drawcards to people embracing Islam. This book considers a broad range of questions relating to Sufism, including its history, manifestations in various countries and communities, its expression in poetry, women and Sufism, and expressions among popular spirituality. In addition, the volume challenges the long-held view of Sufism as being necessarily peaceful, through a consideration in one paper of Sufis engaging in violent Jihad. The book works at the interface between the scholarly and the practical, using rigorous methodology to ensure that its findings are reliable, while also giving attention to how Sufi thinking impacts the daily lives of Sufis. This represents an original and important dimension of this study, given the significant role played by Sufis throughout Islamic history in enriching discussion of intellectual and charismatic questions, as well as informing popular practice among “Folk” Muslims.

The Routledge Handbook of Race and Ethnicity in Asia introduces theoretical approaches to the study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity in Asia beyond those commonly grounded in the Western experience. The volume’s twenty-eight chapters consider not only the relationship between ethnic or racial minorities and the state, but social relations within and between individual and transnational communities. These shape not only the contours of governance, but also the means by which knowledge of national identity, ‘self ’, and ‘other’ have been constructed and reconstructed over time. Divided into four sections, it provides holistic and comparative coverage of South, South East, and East Asia, as well as Australasia and Oceania; an area that extends from Pakistan in the West to Hawai’i in the East. Contributors to this handbook offer a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, opening a domain of scholarship wherein the relationship between phenotype and racism is less pronounced than European and North American approaches, which have often privileged the so-called ‘colour stigmata’, leading to further exclusions of particular ethnic, racial, and indigenous communities. This volume seeks to overcome racism and white ideologies embedded in theories of race and ethnicity in Asia, proving a valuable resource to both students and scholars of comparative racial and ethnic studies, international relations and human rights.

The first study in English of Islamic thought in China, this book shows that this tradition was informed by both Sufism and Neo-Confucianism; translations of two classic works are included.

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.