Book Reviews

review of religion and chinese society 6 (2019) 147-153 brill.com/rrcs

Book Reviews

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Kristian Petersen, (2018) Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab. New York: Oxford University Press. xiii + 285 pages. Hardcover. isbn 9780190634346. US$99.00.

Kristian Petersen’s new book, Interpreting Islam in China, is a masterful study of Sinophone Muslims in late imperial China. It synthesizes much recent work on Sino-Muslim intellectual networks of the Ming-Qing periods, while con- tributing new research, particularly on Ma Dexin 馬德新 (1794–1874), which will be of interest to historians and religious scholars alike. Petersen’s analysis focuses on pilgrimage, scripture, and language, spanning from the local to the global. The book seeks to understand how Muslims translated core Arabic and Persian texts into an evolving Chinese corpus, the Han Kitab, which was cru- cial for the self-conception of this Chinese-speaking community at the edge of the Islamicate world. Chapter One traces the history of Sinophone Muslims in China from the Tang dynasty onwards. Scholars here will find Petersen’s theoretically-informed employment of terms like “vernacular,” “Islam,” “popular,” and “Muslim” useful for conceptualizing future works. The chapter proceeds over familiar territory but concludes with a section, “Global Muslim Networks of Exchange,” which nicely situates changes in nineteenth century Sino-Muslim thought within the broader Islamicate world. Chapter Two outlines the historical network that produced the Han Kitab corpus while providing valuable biographical details on Wang Daiyu 王岱輿, Liu Zhi 劉智, and Ma Dexin, with each scholar rep- resenting a different phase in the development of the tradition. Chapter Three not only provides a thorough intellectual history of conceptions of the hajj in China, but also documents the travels of Ma Dexin, the first Chinese pil- grim to record his hajj in detail, which he began in 1841. Petersen is careful to note that other Muslims, such as Ma Huan 馬歡, Ma Laichi 馬來遲, and Ma Mingxin 馬明心 had completed the pilgrimage in earlier centuries. Petersen’s work makes clear that, just as we do not have attempts at a Chinese translation

148 book reviews of the Qur’an until the nineteenth century – and no complete translation until the twentieth – it is not until the nineteenth century that we have such de- tailed records of a physical pilgrimage to Mecca. Chapter Four picks up with the evolving nature of ways the Qur’an was used by Muslim intellectuals in China and brings to light important revelations, such as Wang Daiyu’s selec- tive quotations from the scripture and his flexible translations of certain key passages. Chapter Five documents the role of Arabic as a source of linguistic authority that shaped Islamic debates in China with increasing prominence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Petersen’s contributions to the field are many. While acknowledging the importance of local history, Petersen brings Muslims across China into a sin- gle narrative, because they were historically in conversation with each other across both time and space. The breadth and scope of the book in terms of chronology and geography are impressive, making the monograph relevant and approachable to scholars working across disciplines and dynasties. Read- ers will come away with a clear appreciation of the changing conceptualiza- tions of pilgrimage, the Qur’an, and Arabic in China. Interpreting Islam in China also poses questions for future scholarship to pick up. Petersen notes that growing prominence of Arabic by the late eighteenth century came with “the waning of Persian as a dominant discourse for surrounding Muslim communities” (181). Arabic was in a sense rediscovered in the late eighteenth century, since, as Petersen writes, “in the seventeenth century, Sino-Muslims were generally disconnected from their coreligion- ists abroad” (196). We might also add that, in the early-to-mid Ming dynasty, there appears to have been many Persian speakers in China, as evidenced by the prominence of Persian in Ming court records and translation offices. The transition we may be looking at here is not only a rediscovery of Arabic in the Sinophone lexicon of Islam, but a transition from Persian to Arabic that may be seen in other Asian Islamic centers such as India. Where Persian fits into the grand narrative of Islam in China – perhaps in roles as an intellectual, dip- lomatic, or ancestral language – could be something worth considering going forward. It is now well-known in the field that the Han Kitab corpus constituted an elite ideological project envisioning how Islam should be practiced, rath- er than a reflection of how it actually was practiced in China. Petersen of course acknowledges this. Yet one of the great joys I had reading this book was in those cracks that shine light onto how Islam was conceived by Sino- Muslims in popular discourse, particularly through the works of Ma Dexin. Even while bemoaning the low level of religious knowledge of his Muslim peers, Ma Dexin, who had travelled the widest of any of the people in the study

review of religion and chinese society 6 (2019) 147-153