ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE. The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 248.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 280. $45.00

Abstract

This book by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is a scholarly and detailed study of the creation in seventeenth and eighteenth-century China of a series of Islamic texts that came to be known as the Han kitab. The focus of the book is on the network of Chinese scholars who translated or composed these texts, their relationships to each other, and the ways in which they combined their identity as Confucians with their identity as Muslims. Its description of a Muslim community living at ease in an ideologically dominant Confucian state is one that is as controversial as it is relevant to our time. It is common to associate Islam in China with the Uyghurs and other non-Chinese peoples of Chinese Central Asia. This book shifts our attention away from the troubled and rebellion-prone northwest and toward a quite different scholarly community that flourished in eastern China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We read of Muslim communities in Nanjing and other cities in the Chinese heartland that supported Islamic schools, scholarship, and publishing endeavors. Leading families in these communities traced their origins to Muslims who had served under past Central Asian rulers of China. They kept up these traditions through successful participation in the Confucian examination system but also produced sons who became experts in Islamic scholarship. Faced with the community's isolation from the wider Islamic world and its limited knowledge of Arabic, these men produced a body of literature on Islam in Chinese, the Han kitab, which included translations of works in Persian and Arabic as well as original compositions in Chinese. A tradition of Islamic education based on these texts was to last into the early twentieth century.