Religious authority.
National recognition.

The Huiru Grammar

Islamic Argument and Authority in Republican China

How could Chinese Muslims sustain centuries of disagreement without losing the ability to recognize one another’s arguments as Islamic? My dissertation locates that continuity in a learned system of reasoning: the Huiru Grammar.

Developed through jingtang mosque education and the Chinese-language Islamic writings known as the Han Kitab, this grammar shaped what counted as a valid question, acceptable evidence, and a qualified speaker. It made disagreement possible within a shared intellectual world.

The project follows these practices into Republican public life. In 1932, a Shanghai magazine and publisher printed material insulting the Prophet of Islam. Clerics debated the offense through inherited Islamic scholarship, while Muslim associations petitioned the government in the language of citizenship and religious freedom. I ask how the two forms of argument worked together.

Other chapters examine the intellectual work of Bai Shouyi and Tang Kesan, the translations of Chinese students at al-Azhar, and the continuing transmission of religious knowledge at the Great Mosque of Xi’an. My fieldwork there in 2023–2024 connects printed texts with the practices through which scholars learn to interpret them.

I am developing the dissertation into a book project on Islamic argument, translation, and authority in modern China.

Learning Islam,
Testing China

How the Chinese state examined its Muslims abroad

In spring 1943, the Republic of China’s legation in Cairo surveyed sixteen Muslim students from China. Its forms and interview questions assessed national-language proficiency, knowledge of Chinese history, political loyalty, and views of Xinjiang.

The students were studying Islamic scholarship at al-Azhar. Yet the diplomatic assessment evaluated a different kind of qualification: their capacity to represent China. Wartime relief became entangled with judgments about national competence.

Drawing on archival research in Cairo and a dossier preserved in Taipei, this project examines how officials first grouped students of diverse regional and linguistic backgrounds into the category “Chinese Muslim students,” then ranked them according to state-defined measures of belonging.

The first article in development focuses on the survey’s questions and verdicts. A planned second study follows returnees across the 1949 divide and the Taiwan Strait as they became Arabists, interpreters, professors, and participants in Islamic diplomacy. Together, these inquiries may develop into a book tentatively titled Testing China Abroad.