For more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland, from royal astronomers to butchers, merchants to diplomats, and scholar-officials to farmers. Yet the Muslims of China are often depicted as inherently foreign, their religion as incompatible with Chinese culture. Islamic China offers a re-appraisal of this history, endeavoring to recapture the ordinariness of Chinese Muslim communities as they created a bewildering diversity of Islamic cultures, in constant conversation with Muslims abroad and non-Muslims at home. In doing so, it explores how these communities, whose categorization has so often been seen as problematic, can teach us something about the ways social categories are made.
