Self-Perception and Identity 113
documented—and thereby propagated—itself through use of the
genealogical genre of literature championed by the Confucian elite.
The fact that Muslim Chinese deployed genealogical discourse
to describe themselves and their history is, on one level, not sur-
prising. As Wilson has observed, this discourse so prevalent was by
the Ming as to have become “naturalized”: “It is difficult to deter-
mine precisely when this genealogical discourse emerged in Confu-
cian discussions of their tradition. It was so pervasive in Confucian
writings, particularly by the Ming, that it was virtually invisible to
those who spoke in this idiom. Genealogy was ‘naturalized’ to the
point that Ming Confucians were barely able to speak outside it
and or without its idioms.”^77 Part and parcel of this naturalization
was an expansion of the genre, not of the sort that Wilson de-
scribes but here of a sort that made the genre accessible to all
learned Chinese, not just Confucians. Just as Bol sees in shi a cate-
gory applicable not just to the Confucian elite, Zhao’s text pro-
vides illustration of the fact that genealogical literature was useful
to schools outside of mainstream Confucian tradition.
Elman’s suggestion of a nuanced understanding of what entities
might fall under the rubric “school,” Wilson’s expansion of the
category of genealogical discourse to include many different sorts
of materials, and Bol’s use of the term literatus in a fashion that
transcends specifically Confucian culture—all are important inter-
pretive strategies for considering the Chinese Muslim intellectual
elite. Zhao’s Genealogy both corroborates such expanded defini-
tions and urges us to question further our assumptions about the
supposedly well-circumscribed intellectual categories in the Ming
and Qing. For Zhao’s text simultaneously fits perfectly into these
categories and defies them. It provides us with a textbook example
of the genealogical genre of literature so popular with the Confu-
cian elite, yet it does not deal with Confucianism; it describes what
clearly can be called a school of thought, but one that would never
be acknowledged as legitimate by the Confucian elite; it is written
by a “literatus” about “literati” (categories thought to be monopo-
lies of the Confucian elite), yet its Muslim author feels no need to
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77. Wilson, Genealogy of the Way, p. 11.