Book Talk – Islamic China: An Asian History

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Pilgrims and incense urn at the shrine of Aḥmad Sirhindī. Sirhind, India, July 2018. Credit: © Rian Thum

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.


Monday, November 10, 2025
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Public Affairs, Rm 2270


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Dr. Rian Thum is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, 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.

Sponsor(s): Program on Central Asia, APC, Asia Pacific Center, Center for the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies

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