Rian Thum – författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
326 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
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.
450 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past.Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints.Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.