Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China: Debates on Hui Identity and Islamic Reform

In the early twentieth century, as the multiethnic Qing empire transformed into the Republican Chinese nation-state, Chinese Muslims faced new challenges, confronting competing visions of nation-building, religion, secularism, democracy, and modernity. In this book, Hale Eroglu explores how a group of key figures navigated this complex landscape, offering a transnational intellectual history of Chinese Muslim thought. Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China provides a portrait of underrecognized reformists who aimed to turn Muslim subjects into active Chinese citizens and revive “true” Islam in order to aid China’s development and promote peace. Eroglu examines reformists’ engagement with local and transnational Muslim currents, spanning “orthodox,” “heterodox,” reformist, secular, and socialist movements from Egypt, Britain, India, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. She reveals their varied strategies and highlights how they adapted global ideas to address local challenges such as the policies of the Nationalist and Communist parties, the antireligion discourse of the New Culture Movement, and the anti-Islam rhetoric of Christian missionaries. Drawing from Republican and early Communist-era journals, Chinese translations of Islamic sources, and memoirs and travelogues, this book offers a nuanced understanding of Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals’ efforts to balance local and global influences in shaping their community’s future.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Rectifying the Name: The Controversy About the Identity of the Hui 2. A Place Under the Sun: Chinese Muslims and the Constitutional Movement 3. The Awakened Muslim: Turkish Modernity as an Alternative Model 4. The Free Thinkers: The Ahmadi Message in China 5. In Search of a Pivot: Chinese Muslims and Islamic Reform in Egypt 6. The Revolutionary Muslim: Hui Intellectuals During the Era of Mao Conclusion Epilogue