Editor’s Introduction: Four Centuries of Islamic Thought in Chinese
Editor’s Introduction: Four Centuries of Islamic Thought in Chinese
Muslims have lived in the Chinese culture area since the seventh or eighth century – the mid-Tang dynasty – and have acculturated, as all immigrants do, in order to live comfortably in what began as an alien environment. Over a millennium, through ordinary social processes, including intermarriage with local women, they ceased being utterly foreign and became local but different, Sinophone but not entirely Chinese. Though they spoke the Chinese of their home districts, many of them nonetheless retained female endogamy (males could marry non-Muslim women who converted to Islam), pork avoidance, unfamiliar rituals, mosque-centred community solidarity, and outlandish vocabulary, rendering them unconventional, somewhat distant, sometimes defensively hostile towards their non-Muslim neighbours, who saw them as ‘familiar strangers’....
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