118 The Han Kitab Authors
early observers to overlook the historical circumstances surround-
ing the production of this literature and to assume a long “incuba-
tion” period during which (an essentialized) “dormant Islam” had
been waiting for the right opportunity, or the trigger, to appear in
the form of the Han Kitab books.
My purpose here is not to counter missionary evaluations of Is-
lamic literature. I will, however, use these missionary observations
as point of departure and shift the focus of study from the search
for intentions to a presentation of the Han Kitab scholars as a Chi-
nese school of scholarship emerging out a scholarly network.
The productivity of the authors of the Han Kitab peaked
roughly between 1630 and 1730. Two particular characteristics of
these authors and scholars are striking. First, the vast majority
were products of and participants in the educational network. Sec-
ond, and in relation to the first, is the marked ways in which the
texts of the Han Kitab were not the output of an individual and
isolated writing process. Instead, these works were the result of
conscious and intensive cooperation and correspondence among a
large group of Chinese Muslim literati. For the most part, the
members of this group were connected to one another most im-
mediately through the educational system and its network; others
were bound together by kinship or communal ties of financial and
intellectual patronage. The group consisted of authors, translators,
editors, and publishers, as well as contributors of prefaces, greet-
ings, and postscripts, not to mention those who supplied financial
assistance. This collective, or interactive, process of literary pro-
duction was informed by, and constitutive of, the Chinese Muslim
educational network’s constituency.
The educational network produced scholars, often in genealogi-
cal chains, and it devoted itself to the simultaneous transmission and
expansion of a body of knowledge that came through this transmis-
sion and expansion to be not simply Muslim but distinctly Chinese
Muslim. So, too, the constituency of the network understood itself
as distinctly Chinese and distinctly Muslim—as occupying the over-
lapping shared space of those two categories.
In order to simplify the presentation of the myriad figures of
this network and the works to which they were connected, I have